“I’ve thought of a name for the new snake,” I told Chuck a week before we even went looking for a western hognose to replace Roggen who died a couple months ago. “How about ‘Encore’?” The look on Chuck’s face answered my question. We’d have to give it more thought. Plans for Reptile Show When …
When a friend called to tell me his granddaughter had acquired a pet garter snake and asked how she could feed it, I wondered how long this young girl would remain interested in such a pet. I also wondered how I felt about removing an animal from the wild, even though two of our snakes …
We cried when our dog died over 30 years ago. We cried when our cat died in the mid ’90s. We cried when our hamster and our turtle and our parakeet each died. And only a week after watching our bullsnake Hatch leave with our zookeeper friend Bryon Shipley, we cried when our western hognose …
For almost the past ten years we have traveled with four snakes. One of these snakes, our bullsnake Hatch, turned 10 this August. Chuck hatched her out in an incubator at the Denver Zoo after a pair of bullsnakes at Cherry Creek State Park in the Denver area produced 13 eggs. Hatch’s was the only …
“Where do I go to find a bear? A moose? A bighorn sheep?” While working at a visitor center, those are some of my least favorite questions. A wildlife refuge or a park is not a zoo. Some locations may be more likely to produce an animal for observation, but there are no guarantees. And …
Encountering enthusiastic young people has been a driving force for us in our work as naturalists. While it’s easy to criticize the youth of today (as it has been since the beginning of time), we find it more rewarding to search for those with passion and interests that could carry them through their lives and …
“Snakes are mean!” a seven-year old boy exclaimed when we asked him if he wanted us to remove one of our snakes from its cage so he could have a closer look. “They’re really mean!” “Snakes aren’t mean,” I told the youngster. “They are neither good nor bad, but like most animals, they have a …