A new animal friend arrived this week at the Great Bend Brit Spaugh Zoo. Pearl is a pot-bellied pig that needed a place to live, Curator and Zoo Supervisor Ashley Burdick said.
The exhibit area that used to house wolves was available. The exhibit has been empty for several years, Burdick noted.
“That exhibit yard and building don’t really fit together. Anything that could go in the yard is too big for the building and anything that could fit in the building would be able to get out of the yard,” she said. “A pig works well for that yard area as they are temperature-hardy and don’t need the building very often.”
Rerun is in the house
At the end of April the zookeepers moved Rerun, the lar gibbon, into an exhibit area where she can be seen by the public. Viewed from Main Street, her exhibit is the one across the street from Pizza Hut.
Before being moved to this exhibit, Rerun lived “off-exhibit” in the zoo’s quarantine area.
Rerun suffered a stroke before she came to the Great Bend zoo and because of that she doesn’t always move around much and can be shaky at times. Unlike other gibbons, she spends a lot of time on the ground. She is 31 years old.
Zito, the zoo’s male lar gibbon, died last November. Burdick said they are still trying to find a companion for Rerun but due to her age and health conditions it’s not easy to find a male that she is compatible with.
Happy capys
In other zoo news, the new capybaras that arrived on April 14 are settling in well. Readers may recall that capys are the largest rodent species on earth. The two brothers acquired by the zoo, named Steve and Sam, each weigh about 50 pounds but by the time they are fully grown they could weigh three times that.
They are housed in what used to be the tiger exhibit.
MGM tiger?
We found this fun post on the zoo’s Facebook page, along with a video clip of Luke the lion “vocalizing.”
“Did you know a lion’s roar can be heard up to 5 miles away? If you live near the zoo, you’ve probably heard Luke calling out his territory. Often when people think of lion roars, they envision that of the old MGM logo, which appears to feature a lion roaring. The sound used for this is actually from tiger vocalizations, as lions often have shorter, repetitive sounds and didn’t have the ferocious sound they were looking for. Luke is often camera shy and likes to stop roaring whenever he sees you trying to record!”
