Guess Who Is Bubbles' Latest Fan?

Idina Menzel! 

Pretty unexpected, right? 

Today we were honored at the Children’s Zoo to have Idina Menzel, her two year old son, Walker and friends visit. 

On their tour, Idina and Walker got to meet the real Bubbles! They gave her a little scratch and a bamboo treat and the cow was in heaven. 

Idina said that she loved the book and that it would be Walker’s bedtime story that night (hard to compete with some Broadway caliber lullabies though, right?). 

As someone who wishes they could sing, I was a bit starstruck. My sister, Nancy, texted and told me to tell Idina that “she has the most incredible voice and I (Nancy) sing to Wicked pretending to be her (Idina) all the time!!!” I relayed the message and it was well received. 

I wanted to get a video of Nancy singing Wicked and pretending to be Idina but was told “no way Jose." 

So, we’ll just celebrate Bubble’s latest fans with this little clip instead:

And what the heck, I love me some good singing. So we’ll do this one too: 

Weekend Happenings.

Busy weekend in Zebu-Land! 

And by weekend I mean Thursday/Friday, of course. 

Did you know that most zookeepers don’t have normal weekends? Shouldn’t really come as a surprise. After all, animals need to eat everyday, right?!

When I say weekend, I almost always mean Thursday/Friday because this is my weekend. This drives my family nuts. Wednesday is not Friday and Friday is not Wednesday and one should not call Saturday Monday if for the majority of Americans Monday is Monday and not Saturday. Right? 

I say, who cares. 

If I don’t call Wednesday Friday and Thursday/Friday “the weekend” I’ll go crazy. It’s some sort of special state of mind waking up and knowing it’s your Friday rather than your Wednesday.

Whatever you want to call it, Thursday/Friday, my weekend, was extremely busy! In fact, I spent most of it at the Zoo! Go figure!

Thursday was the Zoo book signing next to the real, live Bubbles and in front of the Living World. It was a beautiful day and lots of fun to talk to visitors and readers alike and introduce children to our special cow. 

Friday was Express Scripts Legal Department “Day at the Zoo.” In honor of the occasion, I gave behind the scenes tours to a few employees and then joined them for a picnic in Forest Park where we ate bbq and several people purchased “Bubbles” books. 

All in all it was a successful weekend! 

Or Thursday/Friday. 

Whatever.

Check out a pic of my dad and I (Happy Almost Father’s Day) with “Bubbles” at the picnic in Forest Park!

Noah's Ark or Schindler's List?

Click HERE for an interesting article about Zoos, featuring our own, Saint Louis Zoo, published in yesterday’s New York Times. 

My writer friend, Julie Theibert, summed it best:

“It made me really sad to think that my great-grandchildren won’t live in this magically diverse world, won’t be a part of the large mammal family that I was a part of." 

Indeed. 

The world we are leaving our grandchildren will likely be dramatically different. 

I really thought Bob Merz, manager of the Saint Louis Zoo Insectarium, articulated the scary reality of the loss of ecological diversity quite well saying, “It is like looking out the window of an airplane and seeing the rivets in the wing. You can probably lose a few, but you don’t know how many, and you really don’t want to find out.”

What the article doesn’t mention, is the Saint Louis Zoo’s WildCare Institute. The Wildcare Institute works in the field to save endangered species. Yes, they have to focus on a choice few, but this is a real, true effort to stop extinction, initiated by a Zoo.

In the end, no one goes into the field of Zoo work for the money. Everyone is working for the animals. Both within their care and in the wild. In the end, the people who spend their lives caring for animals will do everything in their power to maintain biodiversity in our world. 

Maybe Zoo’s have become more like Schindler’s List than Noah’s Ark, but maybe, with work and effort and programs like the WildCare Institute, we can and will at least save a few. 

Of Rats and Women.

I have a complex relationship with rats. 

Let me explain. For most of my early years the only image of a rat I’d come across was that of Templeton from Charlotte’s Web, a fairly likable fellow, if a bit of a glutton. 

I was raised in the suburbs, in a house built in the 1970s, occasionally accessed by a mouse or two, but nothing remotely so threatening as a rat.

The times, oh how they have a changed.

Now navigating my twenties in an at-least-ninety-year-old apartment closer to the city, I’ve got myself a rat story.

It all started with a broken pipe. Our maintenance man, upon fixing said pipe, left a gaping hole in the ceiling of our bathroom. Fine. Later in the week, it would be fixed.

It was evening. Nearly nine o'clock. Dark outside and quiet. I was in the bathroom, attending to business as usual, when I heard a familiar scuttling inside of the wall behind the toilet. I’d heard this sound before, as had my roommate. Not everyday, but occasionally. We’d always attributed it to squirrels scaling the brick of the building. Nope. We were wrong.

The scampering sounds suddenly paused. At that moment, I looked up and there, from within the hole in our bathroom ceiling a large rat gazed down at me. We had a moment, the rat and I. We looked at one another. Sized each other up. In the brief instance of this occasion the rat seemed to be thinking “well, this is different.” I merely thought, “well, that ain’t no squirrel.” It lasted mere seconds. No sooner had these thoughts escaped our minds when the rat scuttled away into the depths of the walls and I fled the bathroom, yelling all crazy like, eventually resorting to duck taping a baking sheet over the hole so I could settle down for the night. 

The next morning I woke up, went to work and took care of rats. 

Like I said, it’s a complex relationship.  

I have killed rats. Yup. With my bare hands. I think rats are the only mammals I’ve ever simply killed. It is one of the more traumatic moments in my life and certainly the worst part of my job. We kill rats at the Zoo to feed birds of prey, snakes and a sandcat. I hate killing rats, but Mufasa said it best–tis the Circle of Life.

I also gut rats. In order to train the Great Horned Owls at the Zoo we need little bits of rat to use as an immediate reward. The owls love rats, but they don’t like the guts. Therefore, many of my days begin with a rat in one hand, scissors in the other and a grotesque little surgery full of unpleasantries. 

On the other hand, I once trained rats. There were six of them, all sisters. They were called “The Rainbow Rats” named for all the colors in the rainbow—Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple and Violet. I trained them to run on ropes and through an obstacle course, spending hours getting them used to the clicker bridge and rewarding them with seeds and corn. 

Three years into their lives, as is universal truth in rat world, these rats began to grow old and sick and through this time I helped to nurse them and care for them and make the transition from one life to the next easier on them. They had black and white spotted coats and soft noises with long whiskers and curious, bright eyes. I truly cared for these rats. 

And so, I have a complex relationship with rats. 

They exist, breeding rapidly, living short, little lives as a constant, renewable food source for a plethora of creatures. Yet they are bright, food motivated, easily trained, sociable creatures. And, wow, can they create a fabulous nest. 

I have never found rat feces within my apartment, never discovered my cereal having been gnawed on, never seen anything mysteriously chewed to bits. 

As I reminisce about sitting on my toilet looking up at that rat, I remember its pink nose. Just like my Rainbow Girls. 

That rat scuttled back into its little world within the walls of my apartment and I returned to my usual routine, right there on the other side. 

And you know, I have a complex relationship with rats. But we both seem to be getting by just fine.