Volunteering at the Zoo!
Tuesday 18th October 2016
Recently Paper Round took a trip to the zoo.
For many years Paper Round have been working with The Zoological Society of London (ZSL), and as part of our long standing relationship every year we have a volunteering day at the Zoo, where a group of lovely Paper Rounder’s all lend a helping hand for the benefit of the animals and ZSL.
This year we had the opportunity to help feed the Giraffes!
In the winter months there becomes less and less vegetation for the Giraffes to feed on. They are given pellets which, whilst fuel them nutritionally, are far less tasty than fresh leaves. Our task was to help create a huge stock of these leaves also known as “browse silage” for the Giraffes. To ensure that come the cold weather they’d still have a super nutritious lunch!
Getting stuck in at the zoo
Okapi, Gorillas and colobus monkeys also all benefit hugely from these barrels of leaves - not only for nutrition, but for physiological and behavioural requirements too.
So we put our gloves on and got stuck in. Collecting and chopping branches, picking leaves and then storing them into big blue containers. There was a lot of jumping to squeeze more leaves into the blue barrels and some very interesting techniques used in the process (the crow, the Pidgeon, and the giant donut). It turns out, our particular method of filling the barrels was the speediest the Zoo had ever seen, and the girls beat the boys to number of barrels filled.
It is very satisfying to think that (with a little of our help), there are now plenty of barrels sitting in the crypts of the Zoo, ready to feed the Giraffes for Winter 2016.
