I'd majored in psychology at school. So I basically had no training for this, except for some of what I do with the sea lions, because that's all behavioral. I don't have a biology background like most of the keepers. Still, it's a very small zoo, and management liked me, so I was able to make the switch from education to keeper within about nine months. The thing is, though, most of what I do now is cleaning. That's like 90 percent of the job, which people don't realize.

My days are pretty much the same, routine-wise. I get in around 8 in the morning. I have to be at my station by 8:30, so I'll leave myself a half an hour to change into uniform, get my keys, and read the daily log from the previous day if I'm in a new section. Everything is divided into sections and you're never told where you are going to be until you show up and get your assignment. So, I might be in D building with the baboons, or I might be on trail with the eagles, or I might be in the petting barn. Chances are, it's a different section from the day before, so I have to read up on what's going on.

Then from 8:30 to when we open at 10, you have to get your section open. It's the toughest part of the day. What you do is move the animals out of their indoor holding area where they spent the night, lock them up in their outdoor area, and clean the inside. Then, with most animals, you reopen the inside and give them access to both areas. You also have to make sure the outdoor exhibit looks good and observe whether the animal has any health problems from the night before.

I probably work with birds more than anything else right now. I'm the head birdkeeper. And birds are very susceptible to stress and drafts and things like that. So you have to keep a close eye on them, especially the first thing in the morning because if anything happens, it is going to happen at night. By stress I mean that if you get too close to them, try to touch them or move into their space which they consider their territory or whatever, their heart rate and breathing go right up and they can die. They can keel over pretty easily. Especially with drafts and sudden temperature changes, almost all birds can get serious respiratory infection and die from that. It's also stressful for them just being locked up. So you have to watch the birds closely.

Unless you really hustle, you can't get your station opened by 10. There's just too much work to do in an hour and a half. So most keepers run a little bit late and, more often than not, you will still be cleaning the exhibit when people come in. I am very used to that look people have first thing in the morning--they are wondering, "What is that keeper still doing in there?" That's usually the first look I get from the public.

Since this is a union job, we get a break from 10:15 to 10:30 and then again from 3:15 to 3:30. But lately I've taken on some extra responsibilities and I usually end up working through my breaks. What happened is we have a new curator and she is very research-oriented and I'm working with her. I want the experience for my future in case I go into the field of wildlife biology, which is something that I'm thinking about. Right now, we're testing our radio-collar equipment on our wallabies, which are small kangaroos, although everybody thinks they are just big bats. We have about nine of them and three have been radio-collared. We put these leather collars on them with antennae sticking up in the back. They look like little Martian wallabies. We do four readings a day of their location because we want to study their movements in the exhibit space. We're also testing these collars for use in the field. Wallabies are endangered in Australia and they might want to radio-collar them in the wild and see what their movement patterns are.

The problem for me is that each reading takes about fifteen minutes to do and my two supervisors don't get along with this curator. So there's a bit of politics. I'm directly underneath the supervisors every minute of the day and they don't like the fact that this is going on. So, in order to get this research experience that I want to have, I do it on my own time. I don't mind because I think it is worth it, but that's what my breaktime is like--going out and reading wallabies. Once in a while I sneak a cigarette, too.

After that, I usually do some more cleaning before lunch. Also, at 11:30, I have a sea lion feed. I'm the main feeder, called an "A feeder," for Stella, who is one of our sea lions. That means I feed her everyday that I'm there, all three feeds of the day. The average feed takes about fifteen minutes. What happens is you go to the commissary, which is our kitchen, and get the buckets of fish, which are already made up by the commissary keepers. Then you go out to the "beach," which is the area of the rocks in the exhibit, and you dispense the fish and kind of train them using a lot of hand and verbal commands. I'm in the process of teaching Stella a couple of new behaviors, like splashing people, which the director doesn't know about. Eventually I'm going to train her to do other stuff that is fun. I have the freedom to make up whatever behavior I want as an A feeder. It was a long time before I could do that and I'm more excited about it than any kind of financial promotion or anything else I've received here. I just like the kind of close relation I have with Stella and I'm very interested in training.

At 11:45 the feeding is over and I have fifteen minutes before lunch to squeeze in a quick cleaning or something else that I need to do. Lunch is from 12 to 1, but I have to do another wallaby reading so I leave a little early to do that.

Usually in the afternoon you check on all the animals that you are responsible for to make sure that nothing has died over the course of the hour when you were at lunch. Unfortunately, deaths are a fact in all zoos, especially with birds, which have a very high mortality rate. Fish also. If you have a tank full of fish, you look for floaters all the time. Things don't die that often, but even the best zoo will have one death a month in their collection. We've had a couple of deaths recently. One was a rabbit whose teeth had grown through and it's hard to do dentistry on a rabbit, so he died on the operating table. We also had a raven that was eaten because she was in an outdoor exhibit and some raccoons got in. They were wild raccoons, not part of the zoo. That was very upsetting to me. You get attached to the animals you work with.

In the afternoon, you may have a special project to do for an hour, such as replacing all the soil in an exhibit or removing a dead tree, or something like that that's only done very occasionally where you need a lot of keepers to help with it. Then at 3, you have another break, which for me means another wallaby reading. After that, you usually start getting ready to close. We close at 5, which means we have to get the animals into their nighttime holding areas. The main way to encourage this is to put their food in there. So, in the afternoon, we go around putting food in the holding areas. The public will see us with the food and go, "Oh, what are you feeding?" And it's sort of a complicated thing to explain while were not actually feeding them on exhibit, that we're just putting their food in the nighthouse so they'll go inside for closing. People are always disappointed with that answer. They want to see the animals eating.

In general, the public is tough to deal with. I think that a lot of people who want to work with animals don't work well with people. That's part of the reason why they're in this field. So, it's very common to have keepers that are shy or unapproachable. But we're never rude, you know. We are all required to be courteous and we are. If I'm asked a direct question, I will answer to the best of my ability and, if I don't know, I will find out. I'll go get the information and come back and be as helpful and polite as I can. But it is only 10 percent of the time that a person will ask something intelligent. The questions I get most often are "Where are the tigers? Where are the lions?" And we don't have tigers or lions. So then they keep going down the line. "Do you have any giraffes?" No. "Do you have any walruses?" No. It gets frustrating and it happens at least eight time a day. So it is definitely a challenge to be polite and courteous and to give information when most of the time what people are really doing is not asking questions, but complaining. "Oh, why don't you get rid of those elephants and get some tigers?" There's only so much I can do. I don't make any decisions about the collection.

Before 1987, this zoo had one of every animal in small, old-fashioned, cage-type exhibits. They had a lion, a tiger, two elephants--they had pretty much every major animal--all on about eleven acres, which is a very small space. Then they cut back on their collection and improved the space and everything is a lot better. I mean, they had big cats that would just pace. They had a monkey house which stank. Two or three polar bears, one of which ate a child a few years ago, and then they were all shot because there is a myth that once an animal tastes human blood it is going to develop a taste for eating humans which is complete nonsense, but a lot of people still believe it. The child was like twelve or thirteen years old and he'd climbed into the cage after the zoo was closed. He and some of his friends did it as some kind of game. Most everyone I talked to said, "Oh, the kid was asking for it. Why kill the bears?" And I completely agree, but I guess the cops didn't see it that way. But regardless, things are much better with the zoo having a smaller collection, even if the public doesn't always agree.

So anyway, the zoo closes at 5 and, after some more cleaning and another wallaby reading, I'm usually out by 6. And that's my day. By far, my favorite part is just being around the animals and learning from them. I've learned a whole lot. Animals really are a lot like people. In fact, the dividing line between us and them has gotten more and more blurred the more I learn. We might as well still be in the jungle as far as I'm concerned. Look how people segregate themselves in groups--all the men sitting together, all the women sitting together, you know? Or the way teenagers interact? Well, you look at the baboons and it's just the same--dominance hierarchies, desire for prestige, all the basic motivations. I don't know how well I can express this, but it's fascinating to me. And it's kind of what keeps me going at this job.

I want to work with animals for the rest of my life. The problem is that there are two grades of keepers--juniors and seniors. I'm a junior. To move up to the senior level, I'd have to work here for a few more years and show ability to supervise and delegate responsibility and have consistent good judgment and stay on the good side of management. But I don't actually think this is the career for me because when it comes down to it, it's not all that rewarding. There is just too much damn cleaning. Parts of it are lots of fun and would be hard to give up, but I can't see myself cleaning up after animals indefinitely--and senior keepers do the same thing, so there'd be no point in me being a senior. I really don't know what I'm going to do. It'll be hard to leave, though, very hard.

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