My day usually starts around 8am with cleaning the enclosures of the smaller cats, such as bobcats, lynx, servals, ocelots, and others. We walk along the outside of the barricades, using a long metal pole to scrape poop and old enrichment and pick it up with barbecue thongs.

In addition, we also clean the areas where the cats eat and drink and make sure to take away any leftover food. During the cleaning it is very important to check on each cat and make sure that nothing is wrong with them or their enclosures.

Erin, Michelle and I on our way to cleaning

Erin, Ciara, Michelle and I – tough cleaning crew

Cleaning and double-checking is usually finished around noon or 1pm, we take a short break for lunch and, deepening of the day of the week work on projects or give tours for our guests.
Our projects range from creating new enclosures, cleaning out existing ones to weeding, mulching and dirting. Most of it is hard manual labor, and we usually get home dirty, sweaty and exhausted. But it is also rewarding, since everything we do has a direct impact to the quality of life the animals have here at BCR. Plus we also have a ton of fun!

Erin, Alex and I cleaning out a lockout

Dirting and mulching and weeding and dirting and dirting…

The crew in the middle of a hard days work

Erin, Lisa, Erin and me “falling asleep” in the tigers den 😉

As one of our monthly rewards, we went to Busch Gardens for Halloween. I scare very easily and jump at the slightest scare, so I didn’t dare to go into any of the haunted houses 😉 But it was a lot of fun anyways, and it was great to spend time with the other interns outside of work.

This is at the beginning of the evening, with my lovely housemates Jenna and Erin.

A scaaaryyyy group photo

For Halloween, we offered a special tour for our night tour guests, the Haunted Trail. All the interns and a lot of volunteers were part of planning, setting up and participating in the event and it turned out to be a great success. We built a huge scare zone with various themes and random scarers and we finished the tour at the graveyard, with *”zombies” dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. I was part of the zombie dancers.

Setting up the haunted trail

Swamp monster and me

 

Graveyard zombie

Zombie dancers in the graveyard

Zombie dancers group shot

On Halloween weekend, Jamie, our president, hosted a great party for staff, volunteers and interns. It was a ton of fun, everyone was dressed in amazing costumes, and we even had a mentalist, telling us things about our future.

 

And, last but not least, here is a picture of Sabre and me. He looks small here, but he certainly is a Big Cat.