A carnivore keeper training our male African lion

It turns out that teens all over the Houston area are getting a jump start on their future. Along with Houston Zoo speakers from various departments (Carnivore staff, Vet Staff, Primate Staff, Conservation staff, etc.) we had exhibitors from all over Texas! Some of these exhibitors included University of Houston, University of Texas, Trinity River National Wildlife Refuge, Texas A & M and the Art Institute. The wide array of speakers and exhibitors allowed teens to really focus on their interests, and ask questions to the people who could offer the most help! We also hosted several resume workshops, and an introduction to Zoo Crew by the program coordinator, Patrick Cadriel.

While most teens who visit the Houston Zoo for the conference come here to explore animal-related careers, it is always fascinating to me to explore the variety of careers offered at a zoo or aquarium that don’t necessarily have direct contact with animals everyday.

Education staff presenting our assembly program, "VERSUS: A Wild Challenge!"

Like what? Well, what about education? There are teachers at the Zoo (just like me!) and I even get to handle a variety of animals in programs (like porcupines, macaws, alligators and chinchillas!). Or, maybe you really like to garden-we have an entire horticulture team here that takes care of all of the plants. Maybe it’s art that you’re interested in….well, we have a staff photographer and graphic designers that work here as well.

 The possibilities really are endless, and whether you work directly with animals every day or not, if you’re working at a Zoo, you are making an impact on wild animals. So, if you missed our last teen event, look out for our next conference in January!

A few days ago I stumbled upon an “educational game”  called My Garbology in an educator newsletter that caught my attention. The premise is to sort different “trash” items into several bins (reuse, recycle, compost, landfill). Pretty quick and easy, right? Well, after each item you sort you get an animated story that throws you back into reality.

Now, you may not have a chance to play this very educational game (no sarcasm there…) during your day to day routine, so let me give you some of the most alarming statistics. *BEWARE-these may cause you to punch the computer, pull your hair out, or better yet-make a NEW New Year’s resolution.

Can you see the tiny dot on the left? That's a sea turtle amidst a giant pile of marine debris. Photo courtesy of Seaturtle.org

*Americans make enough plastic every year to shrink-wrap the state of Texas!

*If you fill up a water bottle 1/4 of the way, that’s how much oil it takes to produce that water bottle.

*It takes 250 gallons of water to grow the cotton for just ONE t-shirt.

 *600 plastic bags are thrown away every SECOND in California.

Well. Those are alarming. So what?

You know what I dislike almost as much as those statistics…? A problem without a solution. So, below you can find some solutions to add to your year of resolutions.

1. With all that healthy eating you’re about to do, why not start a compost bin and use those peels and rinds for something good?

2. Plastic water bottles are a waste. Why not get a well-designed reusable one instead? Sigg is a great company that I have purchased from before…they have so many designs to choose from it’s like giving yourself, and the earth a big present!

3. Now, don’t even get me started on plastic bags. For grocery shopping, each aisle usually has canvas bags to purchase. Some stores even give you a discount for using them! For your lunchbox, why not try a reusable small bag for things like pretzels, chips, or carrot sticks. They are even dishwasher safe! And if you’re big into produce this year, try a reusable produce bag!

Reusable produce bags from the Container Store!

I encourage any of our blog readers to post about other ways they have reduced their waste/consumption. The more ideas the better!

Feeding our Masai giraffes

What better way to spend your Christmas vacation than here at the Zoo? Winter Camp Zoofari will host kids ages 4-12 during the week of December 19th-23rd. Since Winter Camp is only a week long, each day will be a different camp topic, depending on the age of the child attending. We have every topic from Adventures in the Rainforest to Wildlife Photography and Stories for the youngest campers!

Each camp day, kids will visit the new African Forest exhibit, feed our Masai giraffes, ride the carousel, participate in a Zooper Challenge and meet a live touchable animal! There’s so much to do and enjoy each day in Camp Zoofari that some days it’s hard to fit it all in.

So, for the next few days our Education Department will be hard at work preparing classrooms, reviewing curricula, getting craft supplies and animal biofacts ready for what is proving to be another fun and exciting Camp Zoofari experience! We hope that your kids will be part of that experience this December!

Campers enjoy touring Zoo grounds (especially our new elephant expansion!)

For more information (including our Winter Camp brochure) and to register, visit our website at: www.houstonzoo.org/camp.

So, you now have an idea of the types of classes we teach as Education Specialists. We are not always in the classroom or going to schools. Sometimes we use nature as our classroom!

Marine Seining

One of the FREE (yes, I said free!)  programs we offer is a field research trip to Texas City Prairie Preserve. During the school year 3 specialists go to the preserve and lead activities such as marine seining, water quality testing, and insect sweeping with different age groups. During marine seining, the kids go out in the water with a net and try to catch whatever they can. This is usually their favorite activity because they like to get in the water. They catch all kinds of aquatic life such as crabs, different kinds of fish, and tons of shrimp!

Testing for salinity

My favorite activity to teach at Texas City is water quality testing. I take my group down to the gazebo and we talk about why water quality is important to animals and us too! We do pH and dissolved oxygen tests. We also test for salinity, turbidity, and take the temperature. All important tests when collecting water quality data.

We like to wrap up the day by teaching the group the Attwater’s prairie chicken dance. The male prairie chicken does a mating dance to attract a female. The kids think this is hilarious but it is actually a really important piece of the prairie chicken’s survival.

So, now you know what an Education Specialist at the Houston Zoo actually does. It is a very exciting and rewarding occupation. I feel very fortunate to be able to share the knowledge and experience I have with kids all over! I hope you enjoyed reading this blog series. Stay tuned to see what happens next in the life of an Education Specialist!

Amy Barnhill on a Zoomobile with an American Alligator

In the last blog I was teaching an Adventure Class. Today I am going on a Zoomobile! What is a Zoomobile you might ask? Well, it is a class (similar to an Adventure Class) but instead of the participants coming to the Zoo, the Zoo comes to them! We bring biofacts and live animals to the interactive learning experience. We have done Zoomobiles for all different ages, from Pre-K groups to seniors. Everybody loves to learn about animals, no matter what the age!

Sometimes the table isn't big enough for all the Biofacts!

Since I am traveling to a school for the class, I need to pack ahead of time. I strategically place my biofacts in a plastic bin trying to fit everything I need in a small space. Once I ‘m packed it’s time to pick up the animals from the Children’s Zoo. I load up the animals in the Zoomobile and head out. After arriving at the school I am escorted to my classroom where I set up my table. The kids come in and it’s show time!

Sometimes a Zoomobile can take you away from the Zoo for hours. I have had plenty where I come back, return the animals to the Children’s Zoo, walk back to the Brown Education Center, unpack my biofacts, and it is time to go home!  It is always an adventure whether you are teaching at the Zoo or traveling to a school.

Stayed tuned next week to see what else an Education Specialist does other than teach classes…

With busy schedules, families, jobs, etc. sometimes it’s hard to make the trek out to the Zoo. So, when we have over 100 educators join us for our annual Educator Day we are thrilled! This was the case this past Saturday.

Educators from all over the greater Houston area came out to learn more about wildlife, conservation, education programs, and activities they could bring back to their classroom. In the morning, we welcomed our participants with 2 birds of prey. A great horned owl visited from Natural Encounters, and a Harris hawk came to see the Educators all the way from the Children’s Zoo!

A sneak peek at our new Teacher Tools page!

After our introduction and welcome, participants had the opportunity to pick between several tour options. These new tours (called Creature Quests) are brand new FREE resources offered to teachers.  When they visit the Zoo they can take their students on a meaningful, fun, and educational trip to several different exhibits. The Creature Quests prompt teachers to ask students further thinking questions, and are all topic specific.

In the afternoon we offered several workshops that included hands-on activities. Our auditorium was the conservation hot spot, and host to Carole Allen (Gulf Office Director of Sea Turtle Restoration and HEART) along with Rachel Rommel and Paul Crump (important members of our Conservation Department). We talked about amphibians (including the Houston Toad), sea turtles, and native freshwater turtles-all animals that need our help, right in our own backyards!

Green Sea Turtle

Needless to say, the day went well. We gave away 3 amazing raffle items which included some very vibrant paintings done by our own Kenyan sand boa, as well as HZI swag for all of Educators who participated.

I bet you’re now wondering how you can be involved in our next Educator event? Right?

Well…don’t look any further because our next event will be the Educator Overnight on Friday, January 27th from 6pm to 9am the next day. Registration isn’t available yet…but we will be sure to post it on our Facebook page (Houston Zoo Teacher Talk), our NEW teacher webpage (www.houstonzoo.org/teachers) and right here on our blog!

We hope to see you then!

This year’s Educator Day is Saturday, November 12th. The event runs from 9:00am to 3:00pm and gives educators the chance to learn new animal facts, discover creative activities to use in their classroom and explore what’s new at the Zoo! We offer 3 to 6 continuing education credit hours for participants, as well as a raffle and giveaways for all registrants. The price is $20 per person and includes admission into the Zoo.

Green sea turtle-native to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico

We tailor our workshops, activities and tours to educators, so we only allow adults over the age of 18 to participate. We welcome college students studying education, administrators and teachers of all disciplines to register!

This year we will be offering three special opportunities. The first is a meet and greet to start off the morning with some of our most special birds of prey from around the Zoo.

One of our conservation workshops will be conducted by Carole Allen, the Gulf Office Director of Sea Turtle Restoration and HEART. Carole will be presenting a workshop called “Sea Turtle Conservation in the Classroom” where she will be giving educators fun craft and project ideas as well as playing a documentary about the endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle.

We will also offer discounted tickets for participating educators to the Call of the Wild Speaker Series that afternoon. Dr. Douglas Smith from the Yellowstone Wolf Restoration Project will be in the Brown Education Center speaking about his experience with wildlife from 4:00-5:00pm. The event kicks off at 3:30pm with informational booths about some of our North American conservation projects. Educators who attend this speaker series can not only buy discounted tickets at Educator Day, they will also receive an additional 1.5 hours of continuing education credit hours. How could you say no?!?

Join us at the Call of the Wild Speaker Series to learn more about the Wolves in Yellowstone!

Registration information as well as our schedule of events can be found on our website at www.houstonzoo.org/teachers. We hope to see you at the Zoo on Saturday, November 12th!

If you haven’t joined the education conversation yet, make sure to do so by becoming a fan of Houston Zoo Teacher Talk on Facebook. It’s the easiest, fastest way to keep up-to-date with all of the educational happenings at the Houston Zoo!

“There’s a wolf in the woods and everyone says, “She’s big, she’s bad, she’s old, and she’s HAIRY! Best leave her alone, she is mean and scary. But we wanted to know, so we crept a little bit closer…” 

Want to know what happens next? Come find out with us! We’ll be reading “What’s the Time, Grandma Wolf?” by Ken Brown each day during Zoo Boo – October 14^th – 31^st. Hope to see you there!

The program is called Alternative Teen Break and it is a conservation education program for 10 teens ages 15-18 in the Houston area, with a field site visit to the Big Thicket National Preserve occurring over spring break in March 2012. Team members who are chosen for this first Alternative Teen Break trip (or ATB for short) will work as week-long volunteers in various conservation projects, providing invaluable conservation services for this area and ecosystem. Team members will learn skills and conservation knowledge from Houston Zoo staff and employees of the Big Thicket National Preserve.

ATB team members will meet monthly leading up to their trip to discuss conservation issues, local wildlife and conduct fundraising events. All team members will have the opportunity to raise funds to help pay for their trip. At the conclusion of the service trip team members will put together a presentation of their knowledge gained for Zoo staff and students’ families and teachers.

Big Thicket National Preserve

So, if you’re a teen between the ages of 15 and 18 that loves wildlife and wild places, and wants to help protect them for the future, join us this spring break as we do something about it!

Applications are available now. All applications will be due on Friday, September 30th. For more information on this program please visit our website.

On May 16th we began our first of eight weeks. I am lucky enough to coordinate this program with Elizabeth Fries (who you may have read about here) under the supervision of our Director, Chance. We furiously started working to put together 8 weeks of meaningful educational and conservation opportunities for the interns.

Looking for an osprey at Armand Bayou

Each week has a different theme. Our first week concentrated on the coastal prairie. We spent our time at the Texas City Prairie Preserve planting native prairie grasses, visiting the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge removing fences, and learning about field research techniques.

Week 2 was centered on community education. The interns took part in on-grounds interpretation, Zooper Challenges, Conservation Stations and even attended an amphibian workshop! They also worked at the Katy Prairie and with the Hermann Park Conservancy.

Week 3 was spent in the Big Thicket National Preserve. We stayed for 3 days and 2 nights in their field research station doing a variety of work. We constructed a bridge, cleared Chinese tallow (an invasive tree), and completed several mussel surveys.

Constructing a bridge at the Big Thicket

Last week we spent the majority of our time with the Galveston Bay Foundation. We harvested marsh plants for their Marsh Mania event and staged the plants at various sites. We then went back and planted the cord grass during a Saturday Marsh Mania. If you haven’t yet helped out at one of these events you definitely should. The staff is outgoing and friendly and the work is fun and well worth it!

All 10 interns with our friends at Galveston Bay and NRG

 This week we are learning about some of our international conservation projects including the Painted Dog in Zimbabwe and various projects in Borneo. The interns are learning how to use a camera trap and identify species in time-lapse photos from around the world.

The next 3 weeks will be very busy as we wrap up the internship. Our interns will work on a variety of different projects from sea turtles to amphibians as well as complete a conservation project proposal by the end of their time here. They will pick a regional conservation need and address it with a solution in a lunch-and-learn presentation with Zoo staff and ExxonMobil representatives. This will be the culmination of their time spent here at the Zoo and throughout the Houston area.

Hard at work on their project proposal

As our Education Department partners with our Conservation Department in programs like these we can only hope that the participants will take what they’ve learned and become conservation heroes in their own right.