Toad Trackers measuring a Gulf Coast toad!

Have you ever wondered what the Zoo would be like at night? Do you have an interest in conservation and amphibians? Maybe you’ve always wanted to become an expert field researcher during the summer? Well this summer you can! During Toad Trackers, a week-long summer camp offered July 19th and July 26th children ages 10-12 can become field researchers while spending the night at the Zoo.

In this brand new conservation education program, students become familiar with local amphibians and field research tools such as kestrels, GPS units, calipers, microchips and scales.  Students practice using this equipment in order to perform tests and measurements when they search for Gulf Coast toads on Zoo grounds during their overnight.

In May of this year we had a home school group join us to pilot the program. We had two very successful evenings of tracking toads on grounds, where we found about four gulf coast toads each night. Each student that participated had a specific job during the field research portion of the evening ranging from catching the toad and placing it in the bucket to sexing and weighing the toad. After the students performed their tests they handed the toad to an employee of the Conservation Department that specializes in amphibians, who placed a microchip in the toad. The microchip allows the conservation department to track the toads for several years. Both the home school group and our summer camp groups play an important role in gathering information for this research project. Not only do these students have the opportunity to become a field researcher for the week, they also contribute to one of the Zoo’s conservation projects.

 So, if your kids are like me and spend lots of time outside getting dirty and collecting snakes, frogs, toads, salamanders or any other wildlife to bring back home-this camp could be for them! Spaces are filling fast, so visit our website to register now: http://www.houstonzoo.org/camp/.

Written by Martha, Education Programs Specialist

The Houston Zoo's very own ZooMobile!

As the month of February ended and Spring Break came near, the Education Department’s schedule filled up very quickly. It’s spring which means lots of school fieldtrips and lots of ZooMobile program requests. As an Education Specialist at the Zoo, in a 5-day week you may do 4 ZooMobiles (each could be about 5 hours long including drive time), 3 Adventure Classes and even Safari School! Phew! It makes me tired just thinking about it, but we do it because we love it, and we know that educating children about the critical nature of our earth, wildlife and natural resources is imperative. Some programs are smoother than others, sometimes things just don’t seem to go your way but you deliver the best program you can because you know the kids deserve it.

On one occasion at the end of March of this year I went on one of the most rewarding ZooMobiles I have ever been on. It was a Tuesday and I remember packing up biofacts with one of our docents, Marcia. We discussed which bird skulls to take, which cat furs and which mammal claws to pack up. It was like any other Zoomobile until we got in the van. Marcia began to tell me how this elementary school came upon having the Zoo out to their school.

She told me that the school we were traveling to is where her daughter is a lead teacher. Well, I thought, this will be great! We will have a teacher that we know to control behavior so we can focus on the teaching…but that wasn’t all. Marcia’s daughter is a lead teacher in a school made up of mostly refugees from around the world. From Ethiopia to Iran and Venezuela, there were students who came from all walks of life with very different backgrounds, and some with very sad pasts. As well as having a school made up of mostly refugees, Marcia told me that most classes were barely learning English. This, I thought, was not out of the ordinary for the Houston area, except that their native languages weren’t necessarily Spanish. Similar to the areas where they were born, their native languages spanned from Portugese to Korean and Chinese. My language skills extend to Spanish, and only short phrases in French and Japanese…at this point I wasn’t sure if the kids would enjoy themselves at all if they couldn’t understand a word we were saying!

 To my surprise, and completely to the contrary of what I had expected, the kids loved the presentations. We improvised in Spanish; we made arm gestures and acted out scenes of birds, mammals and reptiles. We touched furs and skulls and live animals and tried to explain the rest. What didn’t come across in words certainly came out in smiles, movements and sounds. It turns out the ZooMobile can be so much more than an hour long presentation about animals. Animals and an appreciation of wildlife can transcend from any language and any culture, anywhere.

Not only did the kids enjoy themselves, but they earned it. Unable to pay for the ZooMobile presentations on their own, teachers from their school applied for a grant in order to award their hard-working students with a visit from the Zoo. The grant paid off for the kids, and the experience paid off for me. It doesn’t get much better than that!

Written by Martha, Education Programs Specialist

Lories don't need computers to be social, but we love social media at the Houston Zoo!

As we turn in our rotary phones for Iphones and Blackberries, and our desktop computers for Ipads and laptops, we must ask ourselves-what will be next? And what’s next for the Zoo and specifically the Education Department is social media! Now, you may ask yourself, ‘what is social media’? That buzz phrase is tossed out all over the place, but for us it offers our department a greener, more immediate way to reach a wide audience. Whether it is Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook, the Zoo is reaching out online to people of all age everyday.

 Now of course, social media isn’t for everyone. I enjoy sitting down with a newspaper and coffee as much as the next person, but as technology changes, we must change with it.  As for the Education Department, we have switched from handing out pamphlets of information to directing as many people to our website as possible. Not only do we save paper, but you may stumble upon something interesting our on website (whether that is photography, bat houses or dinosaurs) that you hadn’t previously considered. As for teachers, the Houston Zoo has started a brand new Facebook Page called “Houston Zoo Teacher Talk” that is specifically directed towards educators. Become a fan and receive updates on educator workshops, new online resources, insider tips to making your fieldtrip to the Zoo as smooth as possible, and much, much, more. 

If a more private social network suits your fancy, check out Ning. We use it to exchange ideas with our Teacher Advisory Council, but it could be used for anything from a sports team to a special interest group. Check it out-it’s user friendly and sure beats clogging your friends inboxes with emails.

Now, you won’t find the Education Department on Twitter anytime soon…I don’t think updates on how my curriculum writing is going would be the most entertaining tweet, but if it is, you can let me know.

So hop on board, become a fan, lend your ideas. Not only are we open to broadening our horizons, we embrace it!

Written by Martha, Education Programs Specialist

It's almost time for Summer Camp Zoofari!

It may not be summer yet, but it is definitely on the horizon.  And you know what summer means for the Education Department – Summer Camp Zoofari!  Registration is open, and preparations are well under way.

For those of you who have read some of my earlier posts, you know two things about me when it comes to camp: I am the camp supplies guru, and I spent some time on grounds last fall thinking about new camp topics.  First, to the topics.

We kept some of our topics from last summer – why write new stuff when the existing stuff is still perfectly good?  A few of last year’s new camps sold out really fast (Bringing Up Baby, Island Hoppers, and Keeper Camp come to mind) so keeping those for this year means more people can have a chance to experience them!

We have some new, exciting topics debuting this year, too!  Toad Trackers, for our 10-12 year old age group, includes real field research on Zoo grounds.  8-9 year olds can take an Asian Expedition with us to visit elephants, red panda, Komodo dragon, and other awesome Asian animals.   The 6 and 7 year olds have a chance to explore some of the most remote habitats of the world in Natural Mysteries.  And Colossal Creatures for our youngest group should be tons of fun. 

Some of the camp supplies that arrived at my desk last year.

Now that we have our topics, the fun part for me begins: supplies!  I spent most of my day yesterday “shopping” with school supply catalogs covering my desk and at least 5 browser windows open to craft supply sites.  I know a lot of people like bargain hunting, but this is a little different.  When is the last time you did price comparisons for owl pellets or rubber fish replicas for fish printing?  But I got it done!  The list to order is finished, we’ll start placing those orders next week, and then it’ll start to feel like my birthday.  Boxes will arrive, I’ll get to open all of them and see what’s inside, and then I’ll have the task of finding someplace to put everything.

Camp Zoofari is 10 weeks long, and it takes a lot of supplies for a camp this big.  This year we had requests for more than 6,000 sheets of construction paper (in a variety of colors), nearly 4,000 googly eyes, and 2,000 feet of yarn!  And we have to get some odd things, too: pantyhose, plastic insects, golf balls, and a blubber mitt were also on the list, just to name a few.  But we find it, we make it, we order it, or we borrow it – there is very little that we end up needing to substitute.

So now that I’ve told you all about my part of camp planning, it’s your turn!  What are you looking forward to about Camp Zoofari? 

Summer Camp Zoofari is filling fast, so register your kids today!

This is the hut in the Embera village where we stayed during our Harpy Eagle adventure

In Chiriqui, Jose said “Quetzals and Harpy Eagles, two birds that cancel flights and change iteneraries.”  I thought he was just referring to our plan change for the quetzal, but I was wrong.

After we flew back to Panama City, we were supposed to fly into the Darien region, take a boat up a river, and stay at a lodge in the jungle.  But on the trip in January, they did not see Harpy Eagle, so Jose made some changes to give us a better shot.  (Again, no guarantees, but he seemed pretty confident.)  So to get our goal for Darien, we had quite an adventure.

Before heading into the Darien, Jeremy and I took one precaution for hte sake of wildlife: we disinfected our shoes.  Darien is one of the last places on the planet without chytrid, a fungus that is killing off frogs and other amphibians.  While it hasn’t been proven conclusively, people carrying it in on their shoes is strongly suspected as one of the main ways the fungus is spread.  So we disinfected our shoes before we went.

Instead of a plane, we took the van to Darien.  This was a 4 hour drive, which included 5 National Police checkpoints.  We stayed in a town called Meteti, at a hotel that had air conditioning (and only cold water in the shower – woohoo, refreshing!).  Then we took a boat (which was part of the plan already) up a small river that is only navigable at high tide.  Our destination: the Embera village of Mogue, where we stayed with the tribe in an elevated hut for two days.  It was definitely an adventure, which reminded me more than a little of reality TV.  During this trek, including the drive, we stopped and looked for birds (of course), getting several Darien specialties, including a Golden-green Woodpecker which Jose had only seen once before.

The juvenile Harpy Eagle on the edge of the nest, taken at a distance

On our only full day in Mogue, we went on the Harpy Eagle hike.  This was a 2.5 hour hike through hot, humid jungle to the nesting site of a Harpy Eagle.  We started early, so the hike in was not too bad, and despite Jose’s warnings that the chick might not be there, we saw the eagle.  A large juvenile bird, standing at the edge of the nest.  We got close enough to see it through spotting scope and binoculars, but not close enough to scare it. 

The nest was in the top of a Cuipo tree, the huge, deciduous emergents of Panama.  The tree that held this nest would have taken three people to hug at the base, and the top stuck out above the canopy.  The trees lose their leaves in the dry season, to conserve water, which made it a lot easier for us to see the nest.

This is where the patience part comes in: once we were at the nest, we waited to see if an adult would return.  Waited, and waited, for over 2 hours.  Of course, the chick was big enough that the adults didn;t have to come back while we were there – and they didn’t – but it did mean that we got lots of time to watch the chick.  And time to rest – we got to hike back out during the heat of the day, which was very exhausting, and I was glad that I had been able to sit for a while before that part of the adventure.

Tour Travel Tip #4: Be flexible and accepting.
Without a change in plans, we wouldn’t have seen the Harpy, by far the best bird of our trip.

I am an admitted lister, focusing on getting the new bird, the species that I haven’t seen before.  But I did learn one important thing on this trip: the most memorable birds are the ones that show you a bit about themselves.  We saw a Black Oropendola calling (which involves leaning so far forward it looks like it will fall off the branch), a Golden-capped Manikin dancing (including his moonwalk impression), and we heard Keel-billed Toucans croaking like frogs.  So yes, we saw 374 bird species and I added 291 birds to my life list.  But I also got to learn more about the animals and habitats of a very cool part of the world.

This huge hummingbird, a Violet Sabrewing, is only found in the highlands

 Finished with the Canal Zone, we flew into David, in western Panama.  Once we drove up out of David and into the highlands, I noticed several things that were very different from the canal zone.  Forget that we were there in the dry season; there was mist every day and even some rain.  This is where we got into some serious cloud forest.  There were some exciting birds, but up away from the rainforest, there were fewer species, and we had to work harder to see them.  We stayed in Volcan, near Volcan Baru National Park (it’s a dormant volcano), and our big goal for Chiriqui was the Resplendant Quetzal. (I also told Jose I wanted to see a Long-tailed Silky-Flycatcher, to which he responded, “We’ll see many.”  This means about the same as “We’ll see more,” so I wasn’t worried.)

There are some impressive birds in the Chiriqui highlands, including giant hummingbirds and day-glo tanagers.  We also saw a Tropical Screech Owl near our hotel, and the stars at night were just amazing!  We did see several Long-tailed Silky-Flycatchers (always flying away before I could get a picture), but the Quetzal was a more difficult story.

In the dry season, especially from January to March, quetzal is a difficult but consistent bird.  Consistent, because they feed on wild avocados – find a tree where they feed, and you are almost guaranteed to see one.  The difficult part comes in getting to them, because they live at high elevations and spend their time up in the canopy.  So they are a hike-up-a-hill, strain-your-neck kind of bird.  But even if most guides don’t guarantee quetzal, they at least expect to see them.  So quetzal should have been on the list the first day of Chiriqui, right?

Wrong.  Last year’s rainy season was especially wet and windy, and the avocados fruited late.  Typically the fruits are ripe enough for eating by January.  This year, even by our trip in February, most of the trees were still unripe.  Meaning the easy way to see quetzal was not an option.  We hiked up a mountain the first day, hoping to see it, but no luck.  (We did add 40 birds to the trip list by the end of the day, including some very cool woodpeckers, but no quetzal.)  So Jose, our fabulous guide, contacted a local guide he knew, and we tried again on the second day.  After hiking up the other side of the same mountain (the dormant volcano, in fact), guess who spotted a male quetzal high in a tree, pretending to be a branch.  Yup, it was me!  Every trip we go on, I get one awesome spot, where I find a bird and everyone says “how did you see that?” and this trip, I got quetzal.  And I was really glad, too, because I was tired of hiking up the mountain (and honestly, that may have been my driving factor for detailed searching). 

Tour Travel Tip #3:  Be prepared to be patient.
You may have to look a while for a specific bird.  You are birding with people of different skills, so you may have to wait while others find the bird.  And you may have to sit and wait for a bird to show up, which we discovered in our final area, Darien. ]]> http://houstonzooblogs.org/education/2010/03/birds-of-panama-part-3-chiriqui-highlands/feed/ 0 http://houstonzooblogs.org/education/2010/03/birds-of-panama-part-2-canal-zone/ http://houstonzooblogs.org/education/2010/03/birds-of-panama-part-2-canal-zone/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:00:01 +0000 Leigh http://houstonzooblogs.org/education/?p=688

A Blue-crowned Motmot in Gamboa

The first part of our trip was based mainly in the Canal Zone, split between the Panama City area on the Pacific side and Gamboa, about halfway to the Caribbean side.  The isthmus of Panama is only about 50 miles across at the point of the canal, so it was relatively easy travel between these two areas.  Our goal for the canal zone: 100 new life list birds, and a sunbittern if we could get it.

Thanks to the canal, there are several large national parks in the area.  These are areas that were left undeveloped as a military buffer zone, which have now been converted into an ecological corridor.  The parks are home to some amazing animals; we saw a tamandua and a coati, as well as hummingbirds, toucans, and many other impressive birds.  The coolest bird of our first full day: the common potoo, which we saw holding perfectly still pretending to be a broken branch, with a fuzzy baby imitating the adult perfectly.  In Gamboa we saw bright birds called motmots; if you want to see one in person, we have a few in the Tropical Bird House rainforest here at the zoo.  Motmots nest underground, excavating burrows into dirt slopes.  We saw a rufous motmot near a nest – in fact, a few of the people on our trip missed seeing the bird because it flew into its hole.  (It came back out a little later, so everyone eventually saw it.) 

A Coati in Gamboa

We got to spend a day in the foothills near Panama City, at a place called Cerro Azul.  I learned two important lessons here, which are listed in the travel tip at the end.  Let me set the scene.  We were walking through the rainforest; it was warm and humid, although cooler than it had been in the lowlands.  There was no breeze, and we were all sweating.  All around we could hear the high pitched whine of the cicadas, a sound very similar to a circular saw being used in the distance.  We were descending a hill, slipping a little in the damp leaves and dirt.  Jose was playing a bird call through a tiny speaker attached to his mp3 player.  When the bird called back, he held up his hand, gathered us all together, and told us to stay close, move quick, and be quiet.  We got very close to where the bird was calling, and my husbband and I were rewarded with a quick glimpse of a dark, fast bird.  That was all we saw of the Black-crowned Antpitta, although we heard it call again in the distance later. 

The two lessons from our Antpitta Experience?  That’s Tour Travel Tip #2: Trust your guide, and stick close. 
When Jose told us “Don’t worry, we’ll see more” what I learned he meant was “this bird we are working on is way cooler than that very common bird, so don’t get distracted.”  And the closer I was to our guide, the better my chance of seeing the cool bird that might drop back out of sight any moment.

If you were wondering about our goal, we most definitely got it: we saw the sunbittern (briefly, as it flew) and by the third day of the trip, I had added 108 new birds to my list.  Finished with the Canal Zone, we flew west, toward Costa Rica and the Chiriqui Highlands.

One of the many scenic views we enjoyed in Panama.

My husband and I just returned from a two-week guided birding tour to Panama.  We went with a tour company based in Panama called Birding Panama, and we were lucky enough to have one of the owners, Jose, as our guide.  Including us, there were 5 people on the tour, plus Jose.  We traveled to three different regions of the country, spent every day birding, and saw mammals, reptiles, insects, and of course, LOTS of birds. 

The Houston Zoo has a relationship with the Summit Nature Park in Panama, and we are actively involved in conservation projects in the region.  With this series of blogs, I hope to share with you a little bit about the country, the ecology, and the animals of Panama.

Tour Travel Tip #1: Bring an alarm clock. 
Traveling with a group is time-dependent, and some of the places you may be staying may not have a clock, or even a phone, in the room.

Two of the Children's Zoo bats having a snack

Just in time for the new year, we’re starting a new program!  Maybe you’ve brought your kids to Camp Zoofari, or attended a Safari School class with your preschooler.   If you’ve ever wished there was a zoo class for you, you are in luck!

Our new Backyard Wildlife Series is for adults and teens, and offers an opportunity to learn about our native Texas wildlife, have a unique animal experience at the Zoo, make something for your feathered and furred neighbors, and contribute to conservation – all at the same time! 

Each month the class will be themed around a project.  Our first project, on January 9th, is a bat house.  We’ll discuss the bats of Texas and visit the Children’s Zoo bat colony.  And if bats aren’t your thing, we have a new project each month.  Maybe frogs, butterflies, or hummingbirds are what you’re interested in – we have upcoming projects for those critters, too!

Registration is for up to 2 people, and each pair will take home a completed project.  The proceeeds from this collaborative effort between the Children’s Zoo and the Education Department will be donated to a related Texas-based conservation organization.

If you are interested in learning more, or want to register, make sure to check out our Backyard Wildlife Series webpage.  Hope to see you there!

Kellie Pickler at the Houston Zoo, photo from the 93Q website

I was super excited for Kellie Pickler to come the zoo because she is one of my favorite singers. The show started at 2 o’clock and lasted about an hour. She answered questions and sang some of her songs, and told us stories about becoming famous. Everyone that attended had a great time and the best part about the concert was listening to all the fans talk about their experience afterwards. I heard so many people talk about how cool it was to get to come to the zoo and enjoy the animals and then go to an intimate concert at Karamu Outpost for one of their favorite singers. It just goes to show you, it’s a new zoo every day!

Written by Amy Barnhill, Education Programs Specialist and #1 Kellie Pickler Fan