For today!

I was at the zoo from 8-9:15 am today. Today's enrichment material was monkey chow balls. They get this only 2 or 3 times a year, as its pretty calorie dense. It is made with the dust from the monkey chow (which is the calorie richest part) and moistened with fruit juice. You can also throw in a little cereal if you like, I used Rice Krispies. I just basically molded them into 2 tablespoon balls. It was a lot like making rum balls (without the rum of course!) and they smelled like a very wheat-y cereal. They were pretty fun to make, it was almost like cooking.
It was great seeing everyone again today, I really enjoyed it. One thing that sucks was that Mahale spit on me (and then again, immediately). I should have seen it coming because about 15 minutes before that she poked a stick at me from between the bars. It was my fault entirely because I did not greet her at all, and had talked to Mikey and Louie. I am pretty sure she was just jealous and wanted attention. I felt pretty bad, in addition to the fact that it sucks when a chimpanzee spits water at you. Next time I need to make an extra effort to visit with her before I get started.
Putting out the balls was interesting. They are pretty sturdy, but crumble if dropped or squeezed. When I put them out for the orangutans, I noticed when I came back with their breakfast that a rabbit was munching on one! It was pretty irritating, there were 6 or 7 rabbits all around and they didn't seem frightened of me at all. I actually had to kick at the offending rabbit to get it to run off. The ball it munched on, of course, crumbled. Most likely the rabbits got the whole thing because the orangs are pretty slow about checking out thier enclosure, and Rok is the only one that actually goes to the islet where I left that particular ball. It did spark an interesting bit of info from Ann, though. When I told her about the incident and mentioned the overwhelming population of rabbits in all of the enclosures, she told me that zoos with lots of rabbits will have less rats! Apparently, she has been told this by keepers at other zoos and seen it herself. She said that a zoo she worked for had a rat problem (not a surprising thing in a zoo setting) but as soon as rabbits began to be noticed, the rat population dropped. Pretty interesting, and it would definately be an interesting study (dynamics of a rat population when disrupted by a rabbit population in a zoo setting?).
I especially liked her attitude about it all: "Its better for someone to be looking down into the enclosure and see a cute little bunny rabbit than for them to look down and have a big ugly rat looking back up at them."