May Flowers

April showers bring May flowers to the Creation Museum! Our Eden Zoo critters have enjoyed the flowers blooming in our botanical gardens. Our hedgehog sisters, Lily and Tulip, loved playing amongst their namesakes. Even Mushu the bearded dragon got into the spring spirit and enjoyed the sunshine on his scales! However, KuneKune pigs Thorin Oinkenshield and Gimli son of Gloink much preferred the “April showers” part of that rhyme because it creates mud puddles! Pigs are often thought of as dirty animals because they love to play in the mud, but pigs are actually very clean! Pigs can’t sweat like humans or pant like dogs, so they roll in mud to keep cool. Layers of mud also prevent sunburn and biting insects from harming their skin.

Over at the Ark Encounter, our four female aoudad (AW-dad) sheep have been progressing in their training. Rachel, Sarah, and Zipporah (all named for shepherd’s wives) were very skittish when they arrived. When Noel was born that December and hand-raised by her keepers, she became very tame. When she grew large enough to be reintroduced into the anger (the name for a group of aoudad sheep), her comfort around people influenced the other females. Combined with lots of patience and kindness from their trainers, they slowly became more confident around us. Now, they’re learning behaviors to help us care for them better in exchange for treats! For example, they are trained to touch their noses to a target, a stick with a colored ball on the end. Zoo staff can then use this behavior to lead the aoudads onto scales, into new areas, or to simply reward them for coming closer. They now take food out of our hands, when previously they wouldn’t come near us!

The Ararat Ridge Zoo’s Hoffmann’s two-toed sloths, Felix and Eutychus, had some fun painting this month. Many zoo animals paint with their feet, but it’s hard for sloths to paint with their long, curved claws. So, our zookeepers came up with a solution—put blobs of paint on canvases inside Ziplock bags, then smear avocado on the bags for the sloths to lick. As the sloths lick the bags, the paint underneath smears to create masterpieces! Our animal paintings are now for sale in our gift shops. Additionally, zoo staff placed night cameras in our sloth habitat. Sloths are nocturnal (awake at night), and we wanted to see what they do overnight. Turns out, they spend a lot of time crawling on the ground! Sloth limbs are too weak to walk, so they have to crawl. That’s why wild sloths rarely come down from the trees, but our sloths haven’t gotten the memo!

The biggest event of the month at both zoos was shearing day for our camelids. At the Ark Encounter, we have three llamas (Shem, Ham, and Japheth) and two alpacas (Cain and Abel). At the Creation Museum, we have three alpacas (Alfonso, Bilbo, and Samwise). Llamas and alpacas were domesticated in the mountains of South America, so they grow thick fiber to keep themselves warm. The fiber of alpacas is especially valuable, as it is softer and less scratchy than sheep’s wool and lacks a grease called lanolin. While Kentucky has cold winters, it also has hot summers, so to keep our llamas and alpacas cool, their fiber is sheared (cut off) in the late spring. By the time the cold weather returns, it will have regrown. Sometimes the amount of fluff makes them appear to be double their normal size—check out our before and after photos below! Stay tuned for more news from the zoos!