The Zooniverse

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It's been a little while since my last blog, as I have been a busy little zoo man. I have many things to witter on about, so today I'm going to be efficient and use headered subsections. Marvel.

The Zooniverse

Been having a fine but utterly exhausting time of it at the zoo. I spent three days with the chimps, which was a bit of a chore as the main ape keeper clearly doesn't like having volunteers there. Rather than tell us what to do and correct us if we get it wrong, he just takes things off us and does it all again. Doesn't seem to realsie how much extra work this generates. His name's Ankol Mani, but I hust call him Captain Chimp. Still, playing with Julie is great fun, and throwing the food into the enclosure at lunchtime is a laugh, even if it is completely impossible to get a lettuce to clear the moat without falling apart and landing in the water. And I do get to bullshit customers by pretending I know enough to answer their questions (in fact, more often than not, I do know enough).

After the ape area, myself and my two fellow assistants were put onto the sun bears section. Sun bears, or honey bears, are the world's smallest bear species, and are extremely endangered. This makes the state of their cages all the more distressing. The zoo isn't really at fault, they simply can't afford more room, but it's horrible to see them shut into such dirty, tiny cells. However, months of volunteer grumblings have had an effect, and the local authority has given planning permission for a much bigger and better enclosure to be built, which is where most of our programme cost is going. Work is just starting, so hurrah! In the same area, we had responsibility for the secetary birds, owls, civets and bamboo rats. The keeper here, Jothi, is a much better person to be working with, and he lets us get stuck right in. I tend to do the animals that require raw meat and small animals to eat, because most of the girls don't like these things. So I've been feeding the velociraptor-like secetaries and the buffy fish owls most days. I also feed the leopard cats, utterly beautiful creatures who require their bloody lunchtime flesh cut up, even though it's not my area of the zoo, because no one else in the group will do it.

Now, after a four day break (see below), I'm on the savannah area. More news on that when I have some to tell.

Penang holiday

After seven days graft in the zoo, we get a four day holiday. The full seven of us went off to Penang, the next state across. This required a taxi to neighbouring Kamunting, a bus to Butterworth, the mainland of Penang, then a five-minute ferry ride to Pulau Penang, the island itself. Four days of four star loveliness for a mere seventy quid. A private stretch of beach on Batu Ferringhi (not Ferengi, so no little orange men from Star Trek), a pool, a buffet breakfast. My god, I ate a lot this weekend. Spent most of my time with my new friend Holly. She's off to Borneo on the other programme in two days, so we made sure we spent as much time together as possible. A very fine break we had together, and we found a bar that played our choice of music (The Final Countdown all the way!) But oh, how I miss the air-conditioning, and how I despise bus stations.

Running out of time

Damn it, there just isn't the time to finish wibbling on, so I'll have to continue later. I'll be back as soon as I can, troops.

Dan x

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