Civil War Day

I am sorry this has been so long in coming, and I will address that further in the next post. But for now here are the events that occured on November 27, 2010, aka, Civil War Day . . . dun dun dunn. (There are a LOT of pictures in this post). So to commemorate the occasion we set up our two lion pens as two opposing teams. Keeno and Natasha were rooting for the Beavers and Sarabi and Tau were rooting for the Ducks. So we decorated both pens with Sidewalk chalk in the team colors (black and orange for the Beavers and green and yellow for the Ducks).

 And we worked really hard ahead of time making some giant meatsicles which we dyed in the team's colors.

This may look simple now but it took us at least a week to make those since we had to do half, let it freeze for a few days, then do the other half and let that freeze. And then getting those things out of the buckets we made them in took over a half an hour of hosing them down, jumping on them, and throwing them at the ground. Eventually we did get all four (one for each lion) out without any damage to the buckets.

We also had dyed crushed ice that we put out and hid meat in. You can see some in the corner of the shade structure.

After we spent a while setting up we let the lions out. Today was a switch day which means that the two groups of lions go in opposite pens they normally go into. This process involves the younger group going through the pen for the older group to get to the far pen. Unfortunately for us Tau found one of their meatsicles and di not want to move over. It took us quite a while before we got him into the other pen and were able to put the adults out. But on the plus side, they LOVED their meatsicles!

Then we also gave Keeno and Natasha some of those paper mache footballs we made. Now Keeno and Natasha are older and not as interested in their toys and enrichment items as the kids. To see Keeno interacting was exciting, but to see Natasha interacting with this was eve more exciting!

 Keeno with his paper mache football.

 Natasha coming to get her football.

 She didn't like Keeno coming over.

Once she got all the meat chunks out of it she was done.

Now while we had a lot of fun with our lions the other departments had some things going on as well. Ungulates spread some football shaped pineapples (our interns spent several days painstakingly carving whole pineapples to look like footballs, and they did great) and paper mache footballs throughout the park for their animals. The Cheetah department had our two hand raised cats do special paintings for the public to see. Sanurra did a painting for the Ducks and Taini did a painting for the Beavers. Although I don't have those specific paintings to show you here is an example of their work.

Painting by Taini

Painting by Sanurra

The Elephant Department also had a special event. They did a kick-off between Alice and George our two African elephants. The elephants actually kicked footballs across their pen and they saw who could kick the furthest.

George is lining up for the kick!

So you can see that was a pretty busy day at Safari, but we enjoyed it, our animals enjoyed it, and we hope the public enjoyed it too.