Signs

There was one last Dinosaur sign to take down and that was in the zoo's gated car park. So I popped across first thing to removed that and also to take out a sign on a post in the maze. The post was quite firmly in place so I had to do quite a bit of wiggling to loosen it enough to pull out. 

On my way back to the studio I passed an aviary which houses the little black-cheeked lovebirds Agapornis nigrigenis and the brown-breasted barbets Lybius melanopterus. Back in the summer the two barbets (which were newly paired) were being observed by the keepers as it was suspected they had nested and laid an egg in one of the old tree trunks; these had been placed in their aviary just for such a purpose.  When I went past today I saw three barbets, so it looks as though the pair successfully reared their first chick... :)

The animal houses have switched over to the winter-time opening and closing times now, so at 11am I took over the 30 butterfly guides I had photocopied and laminated this morning to the Butterfly Forest house. These are to replace the shabby looking few that were all that was left from the last batch done a few months ago. I had to take out the old and put in the new guides into the holder very carefully as two large butterflies had taken up resting positions on the edge of the box and weren't keen to move. I'd love to work in the Butterfly Forest.. it's always so lovely and warm in there.

On my way back I walked through the Meerkat Lookout indoor house. The youngsters are quite grown up now and almost the same size as the adults. It was a bit chilly outside again but with no sun today so all the meerkats were indoors making the most of the warm sand in there. Two adults were lying nose to tail on their backs having a tussling game which was great to watch and two of the youngster were running around playing something akin to 'Tag'. I couldn't resist standing and watching them all for a couple of mins, listening to their constant murmur of contact calls and watching the play behaviour. Our group has now grown to 20 animals; this year the two litters gave their numbers a great boost.

Then I spent the rest of the morning getting the printing of my 'signs to replace' list underway as the printer inks had at last arrived (after another call to the suppliers and them being despatched by car right away!)  I carried on with these during the afternoon, changing 7 reptile species across from Quark files to Illustrator files in the process. This sometimes involved me re-doing map distributions to fit in with the different application and editing text to fit in a smaller space. Then I duplicated 4 of the species ID's to add extra wording with the species name saying 'juveniles' or '(hatched 2011)'. Then I printed, laminated and trimmed them to size before taking them across to where I was meeting Tim (Curator of reptiles) in the quarantine area. Here I was to take photo's of the common chameleons Chamaeleo chamaeleon that have been with the zoo for a month, after being confiscated by UK customs and border control at a British port off a ship that had arrived from Morocco. 

The animal above is thought to be a female and the one below a male; so to help to try and deduce this Tim put the two together and we watched the colour changes, which are strong indicators of mood. The  'female' was a plain green until the other was put in her vivarium and then she showed some black spotting and the creamy white dashes appeared on her sides. The 'male' stayed pretty much the same colouring as he is below. If the two had been males it is highly likely that they would have both gone extremely dark in reaction to each other. More trials of this sort will be tried to get a better idea of the sexing... a less invasive and stressful way to determine their sex as they are not sexually dimorphic and look mostly similar in body shape and size. Even the casque on the head is similar in size and shape.

They have a definite sexing on one of the four animals as she laid 14 eggs soon after arriving. These are now being incubated, which takes a total of 300 days as they need a period of 'quiet cool' incubation to develop and synchronise properly (mimicking the natural incubation of these animals in the wild). Tim's research on the correct husbandry on these animals has shown that shorter incubations at normal incubation temperatures have produced badly developed young.

Last job of the day was to upload all 106 photos that I took of the chameleons and start sorting through them to see what I can use as a temporary photo for the ID and the photo's I want to use as my reference for the illustration will do of it in the future (it lies about 10th on my illustrations to do list!).