Friends of the Zoo annual meeting

On January 29th I attended the annual meeting of the Friends of Lee Richardson Zoo. We had an awesome catered supper and then listened to a rundown of what the Friends group was up to in 2008. This is a group with over 3,000 members and an income of $87,000. Nearly $40k of that was just from memberships alone. Wow! The big push right now is funding for the new "Cat Canyon" exhibit and the group has raised just over half of the $600k needed.

The thing I enjoy the most about this annual meeting is the speakers they bring in. Last year was awesome and this year was too. The speaker was Craig Piper, the director of the Denver Zoo. He talked for over an hour about elephants, which is a controversial subject for a lot of zoos including Garden City, which is home to a pair of aging female African elephants. One criticism is that elephants need space and the exciting thing is the new elephant exhibit being built in Denver. It will be a huge 11 acre area and the animals (including elephants) will be rotated from one pasture to another througout the day within the enclosure. When he got to "elephants walking overhead on a bridge", I was sold!

Another really cool thing is that the Denver Zoo will be converting 95% of the animal waste plus human garbage to energy via a process called gasification. This has been done for large industries before, but not on a small scale and could have huge implications for waste management and energy production in the future. He got a laugh out of everyone when he said the zoo just didn't have enough poo to run the system, so they'll have to add garbage too.

A lot of Craig's presentation was about the struggle of wild elephants and how the African elephant population dropped from millions in the 1970s to only about 1/2 million in 2008. Zoos are hoping to establish a viable population of elephants in order to preserve the species. The problem is that male elephants are difficult to house and therefore most zoos do not have the space to breed elephants (in other words, housing the male babies once they are not so small and cute anymore). Enter The National Elephant Center.

The National Elephant Center is a new 300 acre facility being built in central Florida, just north of Lake Okeechobee. It will serve as a training facility for all elephant handlers in AZA-accedited zoos and also provide a stop-over place for elephants who's enclosures are being rebuilt around the US. The main thing is the Center will be an important part of the AZA elephant breeding program.

I can't wait to see the Denver Zoo elephant exhibit once it opens and I definitely have a lot of respect and admiration for the good job being done by the elephant keepers at the Lee Richardson Zoo. Oh, and I can't wait to go see the new sloth bears either. Apparently they are very playful!