Back to the zoo!

Well it's great to be back in the swing of things at Zoo Atlanta. Now doing this for "official internship credit." The guys in the reptile dept. are giving me a hard time about working hard if I want a good grade haha but it's all in good fun. Right off the bat, I'm back to performing normal husbandry routines: live check in the mornings, prepping salads for the savannah yard tortoises, thawing out various rodents (and a rabbit for our reticulated python), getting ready for the "3:30 feeding" show with several of our snakes, among other things. Sometimes it feels like there's not enough time in the day but at the end of it I think.. man do I love it all! :) On my lunch break I'll look up more information on a certain species (just this Saturday I was fairly curious about our Aruba Island Rattlesnakes that we're trying to breed (one of the rarest species of rattlesnake, Crotalus unicolor) just because we'll get asked so much about the species we exhibit. We're participating in the Indigo Project with other facilities, which entails the capture of gravid Indigo snakes (the longest nonvenomous species of snake in the US), which are federally threatened here in Georgia as well as in Florida, and raising the offspring. Once the offspring are sexually mature, we release them into state parks across the state. As of right now we have 37 offspring and we have to weigh, measure, and be precise in everything we do with them. Like I said.. I love it!