The Winter 2005 Zoo InternQuest session has wrapped up. For those of you who are looking for career guidance because you have always thought it would be fun to work in a zoo, be sure to read what high school students thought about various zoo careers that they encountered during their seven-week internship here at the San Diego Zoo. The Weblogs are all contained here. And don’t miss the photo journal.

Zoo InternQuest will be on hiatus for the remainder of 2005. You can find more information about animal and science related careers in the Kid Territory section of this Web site under the job profiles link.

What a thrill to be with the first group of people to witness the Wild Animal Park’s new Cheetah Run Safari program! The program officially opens to the public April 2, but the cheetah and his trainers needed to practice before a ” live audience” of very willing employees.
|inline

Spending the day with Megan Owen, behavioral ecologist, at the SBC Giant Panda Research Station, gave me a new-found respect for the math savvy intellects out there. Though she does spend some time out in the field collecting behavioral data on pandas, much of her day is spent crunching numbers. Her job is to take data collected by technicians and organize, analyze, and present it to her colleagues. Not only is it her job to analyze this data but it is also her duty to look through previously collected data from other bears, whether they be pandas, polar bears, or sun bears, and look for patterns, similarities or areas of confusion which need to be further researched. She gets to think up the questions that technicians ask and analyze the results from the data they collect.
|inline

Will a panda prefer to play with an unscented ball or a ball that smells like clove? I must admit that was an unusual question to start our day with behavioral ecologist Megan Owen. It turned out we were going to run our own little experiment the same way someone studying the behavior of pandas would. The panda subject was male cub Mei Sheng and our hypothesis was simple enough: Mei Sheng will prefer to interact and play with the object that is scented. We were provided with clipboards and a packet with an ethogram and data sheets. An ethogram is a list of identified behaviors with their code and definition. For example if the behavior is walking the code would be WA and the definition ” short bout of directional travel, fast or slow, between two points.” The codes are then used on a behavioral data sheet that records behavior at minute intervals.
|inline

Many visitors to the San Diego Zoo attend the various entertaining and educational shows the Zoo puts on. If you miss out on experiences like these, you may be missing out on so much more: tiny hedgehogs, fast-soaring birds, and binturongs that smell like buttered popcorn.
|inline

Today I had the honor of going behind the scenes of an important San Diego Zoo production, the Wild Ones Show at the Hunte Amphitheatre. I met the cast and crew of the show with Britta Wilson-Pastor, animal trainer, as my guide. She has an amazing past in television, and once was a Miller Light girl. After some years in modeling, Ms. Wilson-Pastor felt that she wanted a career that was less superficial and more society-conscious. She had always loved animals and helping them seemed natural to her. With a degree in psychology and a minor in biology from Long Beach State, she applied to the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park as an educator guide. As soon as an enrichment position opened at the Zoo, Ms. Wilson-Pastor applied and was accepted. The Zoo later had to dissolve the enrichment department, and she was incorporated into the Wild Ones Show. Although it took some getting used to, she came to love working in the show area. Her passion has been to make the lives of the animals as comfortable and enjoyable as possible.
|inline

Being a field keeper at the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park may sound like the best job in the world. You get to work hands-on with all sorts of animals from all around Asia and Africa and experience their wonders as if you were right there with them in their natural habitat. Tammy Batson and Rebecca Schafer, Wild Animal Park field keepers, remind us, however, that the only thing separating you and the animals is a truck. This can seem like nothing but a flimsy cardboard box when an angry gaur (wild cow) decides it is not happy with you, or a protective mother rhino thinks you are too close to her baby. Despite the constant dangers, both Ms. Batson and Ms. Schafer think that they have best job because they have the opportunity to give the animals the type of environment that best simulates their natural habitat.
|inline

Riding around on haystacks in the back of a truck over hills, around obstacles, and through little run off gullies sounds memorable enough. Make the valley you’re riding through the East Africa exhibit at the Wild Animal Park, and make the obstacles rhinos, and it all adds up to a day I’m sure none of us interns will soon forget.
|inline

Going into the Zoo InternQuest program, I never imagined I would get to see a monkey in surgery. That assumption, however, was crushed when the interns met with Dr. Meg Sutherland-Smith, senior veterinarian. When we arrived, one of the first things we saw was an Angolan colobus undergoing a surgical procedure.
|inline

At the Zoo hospital, I got an in-depth look at what it is like to be a Zoo veterinarian. Dr. Meg Sutherland-Smith let us experience first-hand many parts of her job. We got to see a procedure being done on an Angolan colobus monkey, which had been bitten by a roommate. When the keepers arrived in the morning to check the monkeys, there was blood in the enclosure and this individual was guarding his arm. When the vet who roams the grounds checked on him, the decision was made to admit him to the hospital. We saw the monkey during his suturing under anesthesia. After the operation, the vet tech had to hold up the monkey so that he could wake up without aspirating. In this procedure, the surgeon, Dr. Cora Singleton, didn’t have to wear a face mask typical of higher-order primate cases. Primates are usually treated with extreme caution because many of their diseases can be caught by humans.
|inline