Keepers Go Wild For Animals Sometimes, It’s A Real Zoo Keeping The Residents Entertained At Woodland Park

The serval - a black-spotted wildcat from Africa - was pacing like, well, a caged animal.

“It could be boredom,” zoo keeper Dana Wooster said. “Or it could be nerves.”

Either way, it’s the kind of behavior Wooster and other keepers at the Woodland Park Zoo strive to avoid by coming up with games and other stimulating fare for the animals in their care.

For example, Wooster caters to lions’ weakness for elephant manure. They perk up when they smell it - they roll in it and frolic with it. So she provides it, hauling buckets from the elephant house for the three big cats to play in.

“It is something they might do out on the savanna,” said Wooster, so she does not deprive them of the bounty here.

Cougars prefer catnip, and respond to it much the way domestic cats do - sniffing it, rubbing in it, even standing on their heads in delight.

Compensating for the cougars’ captivity takes some doing. Their exhibit - state of the art in 1951 - leaves much to be desired by today’s standards, which favor much more natural settings.

Wooster says zoo visitors criticize the small, austere cougar quarters.

“But because it’s awful, I do something about it,” she said.

“The challenge for me is to keep thinking of new stuff.”

Food is always entertaining, but captive animals tend toward obesity, so Wooster concentrates on scents. She keeps a rubber tub stocked with herbs, spices and other odor producers - oregano, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, as well as anchovy paste and raw lanolin. She sprinkles the material in cages to capture the animals’ attention and spark playful behavior.

“If you don’t create enrichment, they will devise their own,” said Lubby Lawson, keeper for the zoo’s orangutans.

Trying to re-create the thrill of the hunt for these food-gatherers, Lawson recently spent a morning stuffing scraps of burlap with peanuts and attaching them to vines. She scattered celery and lettuce on the ground and among tree branches.

Zoo staff have come up with a rubber copy of a fruit called durian that grows in Sumatra and Borneo, where the orangutans are from, and Lawson stuffs those with peanut butter, jam and applesauce.

After her work was done, the orangutans were released into their outdoor exhibit. Towan, a 29-year-old male, sauntered out and went to work on one of the rubber durians, painstakingly harvesting globs of peanut butter. His son, Horan, struggled to get at the peanuts in the burlap scraps while his daughter, Belawan, hauled off a log stuffed with raisins.

In the wild, orangutans spend their days searching for food, so these activities cater to that instinctive behavior.

The trick is not to get predictable.

Recently meerkats - relatives of the mongoose - chased live crickets in and out of a carved pumpkin.

Jaguars Jesse and Gordo hunted for frozen chicks hidden in their exhibit. The birds aren’t plucked - pulling out feathers is much better for the jaguars than pulling out their own fur.

Wooster recalls a well-meaning visitor who scolded her for not cleaning the chickens.

“They don’t have cooks in the wild,” she said with a chuckle.