Second Day!

Today started out like yesterday. I woke up at 5:30 (yay....), tried to help Olivia figure out the directions because she sometimes gets confused between North and South, but it's ok because she is just graduating High School (just kidding! she knows Dallas like the back of her hand and I was honored to drive with her), arrived at Barn 6 and caught up with the zookeepers.
I followed Sherry, the head of the Forest Aviary and the Weaver Exhibit, again today. She began by explaining to me the importance of reusing. She reuses the measuring caps to laundry detergent, food containers, lettuce strainers, and anything else she can find a use for. She finds mirrors at buildings at the zoo that are set to be bulldozed and uses them with baby chicks, so that they do not imprint on her. With the budget, the zookeepers don't always get all the tools they want, so they have to make do.

Sherry also told me how she got into working at the zoo. She majored in Biology and minored in Zoology at the Nebraska State University. She then started working for a company that worked on saving different animals in Nebraska and she was the first women to work in the mountains in Nebraska following mainly sheep. She then moved to Dallas and started working at the Dallas Zoo. After a couple of years, she and her husband moved to Hawaii where she worked in training birds. After three years in Hawaii, they moved back to Dallas and she returned to working at the Dallas Zoo. She has worked at the Dallas Zoo for 23 years, so needless to say, she knows her way around.

As you may have guessed...
this is not Sherry

We prepared the diets for the different exhibits and then headed over to the Weaver Exhibit. At the Weaver Exhibit, Sherry explained to me that the birds with bands on their right legs are male (because the man is always right... HA!) and the females have the bands on their left legs because female birds only have one ovary (cuts down on weight during flight) that is located on their left side. The male Weavers are brighter and larger than the females and they are the ones who build the nest. When the males build their nests, the females choose their mate depending on the nest and the males ability to defend it. After the female chooses a nest, she lays her eggs, then leaves to find a new mate (doesn't even pay child support!) The male then tends to the eggs until they are ready to hatch. We then counted the amount of eggs and chicks in each of the nests. Sherry told me they counted over a thousand eggs last season.

Weaver Eggs

Male Weaver working
on Nest

Male Weaver looking
for a hot date

Sherry also gave me the best advice in the Warbler Exhibit, never look up and if you have to, have your mouth closed while doing it! I pray and pray that this will never happen to me, but I still have three days left, so who knows.

Waldrupp Ibis

Later in the day Sherry gave me the hard earned job of counting birds. Now you may make fun of that, but it is a lot harder than it sounds. The birds seem to know when you are almost done, then they scatter! And you have to find them again and recount. As I was trying to count to see if the correct number of birds from each species were in the Exhibit, I began to notice all the different species. There are the Hamerkop, different types of Weavers, Starlings, Robin Chats, a Spotted Dikkop, Blue-Bellied Rollers, White Faced Whistling Ducks, Lovebirds, Waldrapp Ibis, and Guineafowls.

Lovebird

Blue-Bellied Roller

During my time today, I realized one thing that I would not have really expected, and that's how annoying the visitors are (especially the ones with kids). The Forest Aviary and Weaver Exhibit are right next to the crocodiles, chimpanzees, and tortoises. All the kids believe they can make the perfect Chimp call and choose to scream it loud and free for everyone to hear. They think they can get all the animals attention by screaming at them. They also yell at me while I am in the exhibit, questioning what I am doing there and when I tell them I'm a volunteer, they want to be one (dear lord, no).
The birds are on my side though. One bird, the Spotted Dikkop, kept charging the visitors and scaring them, which is funny because it's so small. And another boy, who was being particularly loud, was pooped on by my new friend, the Ibis's.