Shoutout for cross-team collaboration!

Hello! Carnivore Keeper Adrianna here with more Keeper Stories! I know you all have come here to learn more about what we do as animal care professionals, but today I want to highlight a different team, our Maintenance Team! While we care team members do maintain the animal habitats and indoor night areas to the best of our ability, we also have a fantastic Maintenance Team who helps us.

At Zoo Atlanta, it’s a priority for us to provide dynamic and enriching habitats, which means habitats often need to change. This could be changing/replacing platforms, creating new climbing structures, hanging enrichment items, and creating new spaces. For example, our clouded leopard, Suhana, is an arboreal carnivore, meaning she spends a lot of time in the trees and off the ground. We encourage this natural behavior as best we can with installing small-to-medium perching and moving it around as often as we can. Luckily, with the help of our Maintenance Team, we recently installed large poles (bollards) in Suhana’s habitat that created a good center point to attach many large perches. Maintenance Joe also created some platforms to go on the bollards, and that’s where you can see Suhana a lot these days! Thanks to this collaboration, we created even more opportunities for her to be the arboreal animal she is! Be sure to walk around the Zoo and see all the amazing, big and small structures in the animals’ habitats, and be sure to think of the Maintenance Team!

Adrianna R.
Keeper II, Mammals