Everyday Enrichment: Making Life More Interesting for our Avian Residents – Part I
Many Houston Zoo visitors often ask us what we do to ensure the health and mental well-being of our birds. Our keepers work daily to prepare varied and nutritionally-fortified diets, clean and maintain a variety of enclosures and take steps to ensure the best possible health of our animals. However, this doesn’t address every aspect of caring for our animals: this is where enrichment comes into play.
Enrichment may sound fancy or difficult, but in essence it simply entails giving our animals the opportunity to exhibit natural behaviors and reactions that they would demonstrate in the wild. Here at the Houston Zoo, our keepers work to provide a wide array of enrichment opportunities to keep our animals mentally stimulated (and we try our best to make sure our guests will be able to see these interactions as well).
Here we have an Eclectus Parrot (Eclectus roratus) working to get some mixed nuts and seed that have been placed in a tall can. Parrots in particular are known for spending large parts of their day in the wild seeking out new food sources, so giving a parrot something like this enforces a notion of working to get their food. This bird clearly employs a wide variety of problem-solving skills before she eventually wins the prize of a few peanuts and sunflower seeds.
Ever wonder what you can do to help enrich the animals at the Houston Zoo? There are many items that are highly desirable in our pursuit of providing an ever-changing life of variety for our animals, which you can view here. Of course, you can also feel free to come to the zoo to observe the variety of natural behaviors encouraged through these simple interactions. Many guests can spend hours enraptured by the most basic of natural behaviors, including simple foraging for food!
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