Some exhibits at Springs Preserve, Natural History Museum are looking at you, too
What’s in the refrigerator?
Fresh fruits and vegetables, to be sure.
And in the freezer, frozen mice in assorted sizes.
Clearly, this is not your average refrigerator — unless you’re at the Springs Preserve, where a five-member zoology team looks after more than 30 species of desert dwellers, from rabbits to lizards.
Meanwhile, over at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum, another five-member staff attends to an international array of animals: Burmese pythons, sea horses from Australia, bamboo sharks from the Pacific Ocean, toads from the Colorado River.
“You usually don’t open a freezer and see a stack of mice,” zoologist Rachel VanHorn cheerfully acknowledges as she surveys the refrigerator shelves.
But she’s not there for the mice. She’s there to prepare a healthy salad for a chuckwalla in the preserve’s Nature Exchange area.
“We’re always really aware of the sizes we cut things,” she explains as she chops some kale. “Sizes that are appropriate for them to bite.”
A loose-leaf notebook contains instructions for specific animal diets.
“We always joke that our animals eat better than we do,” VanHorn says.
Unless, of course, those animals are eating the mealworms, crickets or giant hissing cockroaches kept alive in tanks until they’re on the menu.
“It’s kind of gross, but the animals need to eat,” VanHorn reasons.
“The cockroaches are awesome,” adds colleague Katrina Smith. “They’re one of my favorites.”
Then again, Smith says, “I’ve always loved the creepy-crawly things nobody else likes — snakes and lizards.”
She’s heading to feed one of them now: a chuckwalla, the largest nonvenomous lizard in the U.S., she explains.
“It’s my favorite animal here,” Smith adds, noting the “really interesting behaviors” the chuckwalla displays — particularly atop the rock piles it prefers. Unless a predator shows up, at which time the chuckwalla will dive into the rocks, then puff up its wide, flat body to prevent the attacker from dislodging him.
For now, however, this particular chuckwalla’s in a glass tank, where he’s busy chomping on the veggies Smith has supplied.
“He is a huge pig,” she observes. “He always eats for me.”
And while there may be a “a few lizards that are extra-picky,” VanHorn notes, “they’re older lizards. They’re allowed to get picky.”
Most of the preserve’s animal residents come from “other zoos and partners that do capture propagation,” explains zoology supervisor Thomas O’Toole. But “some do come from the wild.”
And some — such as the desert cottontail rabbits and the gray fox — came to the Springs Preserve from a rehabilitation facility.
That’s evident with the friendly fox, who wouldn’t be safe if released,” VanHorn says. “He wouldn’t survive in the wild.”
Although he’s “adorable and will come out to the edge of the cage,” she says, “we don’t like to encourage that behavior,” so staff members will hide food in boxes or put worms in dirt to simulate as many natural behaviors as possible. (They also freeze fresh persimmon, a favorite delicacy, so the fox can snack year-round.)
The human touch also alters the behavior of some of the aquatic creatures on display at the Natural History Museum, according to Jordan Lorge, the museum’s primary animal husbandry employee.
Because the lion fish come from the ocean, “we have to teach them to eat frozen food,” he notes.
And one of the sharks in the museum’s marine life gallery is learning to spit water, Lorge explains. “She comes up to eat and when somebody walks up to her, she thinks she’s going to be fed.” When she discovers she’s not, she spits water.
But that’s nothing compared to one of the shark’s fellow pool dwellers, a stingray who “rolls onto her back if you blow on her tummy,” Lorge notes. (The stingrays also have trained Lorge to “keep my feet flat on the ground and do the stingray shuffle” to avoid their stingers.)
Lorge has direct contact with the museum’s resident animals during thrice-weekly shark feeding sessions and weekend “Critter Connection” sessions, where he and other staffers introduce such creatures as Draco, the bearded dragon lizard, or Charlotte, a rose hair tarantula.
“The good news about tarantulas — they stand up when they bite,” Lorge notes. One crawled in his ear once, he adds, a sensation he likens to “having the hook end of Velcro stuck in your ear.”
At the moment, however, Lorge is handling a Central American red-tailed boa — or maybe the snake is handling him as it wraps itself around Lorge.
“He’s an arboreal snake” who lives in trees, Lorge explains. “That’s why he loves climbing so much.”
But Lorge’s favorite in the “Critter Connection” classroom may be the green monitor lizard he describes as “like Edward Scissorhands,” with a prehensile tail he sometimes pokes through Lorge’s pierced ear holes.
“It’s magical — you know nature,” he says of interacting with the museum’s animal residents.
“We’re the weird ones who think they’re all cute,” the Springs Preserve’s VanHorn says. “That’s how you know you’re a zookeeper.”
Read more from Carol Cling at reviewjournalcom. Contact her at ccling@reviewjournal.com and follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.
Visit live exhibits
Animal residents of the Springs Preserve and the Las Vegas Natural History Museum are always on exhibit, but both institutions have regular sessions where visitors can get better acquainted with them.
The Springs Preserve, 333 S. Valley View Blvd., has regular animal shows focusing on Mojave Desert dwellers. The current one, “Copycats and Other Critters” (11 a.m. and 1 p.m. weekends through Jan. 29), features gophers, geckos and snakes, among others; call 702-822-7700 or click on springspreserve.org for details.
At the Las Vegas Natural History Museum, 900 Las Vegas Blvd. North, visitors can watch shark feedings at 2:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays and 2 p.m. Saturdays, while “Critter Connections” at 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays introduce patrons to snakes, lizards and other animal residents. For more information, call 702-384-3466 or visit LVNHM.org
