My year at Jersey Zoo

My year at Jersey Zoo

My name is Georgia, and I am one of the newest zookeepers in the mammal department. l started working at the zoo in June 2018, and this is my story so far!

I started out as a student, doing work experience five days a week for 12 months. Working with keepers helped me to understand how a zoo works and allowed me to develop my own skills as a zookeeper. When a job became available, I knew I had to apply. After a nervous couple of months, I got the phone call to say I’d got the job – all my hard work had paid off!

As a keeper, I get to look after a whole range of animals from the tiny bokiboky and the gorgeous howler monkeys to the mischievous macaques and awesome Andean bears. During the summer, an essential part of my job was helping the animals to keep cool. I would throw frozen fish into the moat for Chui, our male bear, to go and find. That way the water would help cool him down, but he’d also spend lots of time looking for food like he would in the wild. We would also give them ice lollies or freeze their favourite foods into big blocks of ice for them to use their impressive claws to tear open.

In autumn last year, I trained to become an orangutan keeper. It was a slow process as you have to build up a strong bond with the orangutans. At first, it was quite scary. Dagu the adult male weighs over 130kg, and he has a loud call he uses to establish his territory, but as I got to know him, I realised that he is really a gentle giant. One of my favourite moments was watching Dagu play with his two children, Jantho and Kea. He is so gentle with them, even when they are really cheeky and bite at his fingers or pull his hair.

In January, I had the opportunity to be trained in caring for the gorillas and pigs! Everyone falls in love with our gorilla family – they are absolutely amazing, but it is our Visayan warty pigs that I adore. We have three girls at Jersey Zoo: Penelope, Diosa and Babs and I do my best to keep them busy. They have amazing noses designed to help them rummage for food, so sometimes I bury food in their enclosure to encourage them to go digging. I also make them new toys like bamboo wind chimes to play with. As a treat, they get flavoured water, their favourite is cucumber and mint. They are quite pampered piggies!

Over the past year spent at Jersey Zoo, I often look back and think how when I was six-years-old, this was my dream, and now it’s my reality. If you want something badly enough, you can achieve it with a lot of hard work, dedication, and bravery.