This was the last day of school, which was very sad – it seems to have gone very quickly.
We had lectures on the breeding programme at Hamburg Zoo, and their recent developments. They are pioneering the elephant group birth situation – they let the elephants get on with it themselves (with no human input unless there is an emergency) which is much similar to the wild situation. This is what we do with most other zoo animals, but traditionally zoo elephants give birth with no other elephants to assist. This technique seems to be working well at Hamburg, and I hope other zoos will start to introduce this system – as far as I understand, it will lead to better group structures which will benefit the elephants and their future captive breeding and conservation.
After the end of school some of us took a look round the zoo – I was lucky as I had seen the zoo before the start of the course but most of the others had only seen the elephants and the aquarium.
We had reduced numbers for dinner at the Greek restaurant that night as some people left immediately at the end of school. It was a nice evening, and a little bit silly. We made pictures of our elephants using torn up beer mats. My picture of Boy is at the bottom (the other pictures were far more artistic than mine!).
We had lectures on the breeding programme at Hamburg Zoo, and their recent developments. They are pioneering the elephant group birth situation – they let the elephants get on with it themselves (with no human input unless there is an emergency) which is much similar to the wild situation. This is what we do with most other zoo animals, but traditionally zoo elephants give birth with no other elephants to assist. This technique seems to be working well at Hamburg, and I hope other zoos will start to introduce this system – as far as I understand, it will lead to better group structures which will benefit the elephants and their future captive breeding and conservation.
After the end of school some of us took a look round the zoo – I was lucky as I had seen the zoo before the start of the course but most of the others had only seen the elephants and the aquarium.
We had reduced numbers for dinner at the Greek restaurant that night as some people left immediately at the end of school. It was a nice evening, and a little bit silly. We made pictures of our elephants using torn up beer mats. My picture of Boy is at the bottom (the other pictures were far more artistic than mine!).
More elephants 
An elephant washing her food
Elephants
Big male orangutan
A picture (very unflattering) of Boy eating his favourite food
No comments:
Post a Comment