Great work to the Wildlife Safari Park team for a successful opening day! Guests began arriving promptly at 9 a.m. on Friday, March 28 and the opening day excitement, combined with the great weather, led to a wonderful day for all. 

A big thank you to our teams who were working tirelessly to prepare the Park for opening day and showing our guests why we have the #1 Safari Park in the nation! We look forward to another great season for the Park and the opening of Insect Adventure, a temporary exhibit featuring more than 30 supersized animatronic insects beginning May 3.

For the 13^th year in a row, we hosted the Metropolitan Science & Engineering Fair (MSEF) at the Zoo. MSEF is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to encouraging student research in the sciences and engineering for more than 45 years. This year, 249 students from 11 middle schools and 12 high schools across three counties showcased 238 projects in both Junior (middle school) and Senior (high school) divisions. Elysia Jones, a Zoo Academy Senior, was a category winner in Animal Sciences and overall Top 6 Fair Finalist, qualifying to compete in the Nebraska Junior Science Academy State Science Fair held in Lincoln on April 24. A thank you to our reptile team who assisted with Elysia’s project: The Effect of Time of Day and Season on the Behavior and Enclosure Usage of Alligators.

This month, the Behavior Advisory Group is excited to highlight our latest enrichment initiative: a PVC enrichment workshop held by Josiah House, hoofstock senior keeper. This workshop was created to help our animal care teams overcome enrichment challenges and focus on the creative use of PVC materials, a versatile and cost-effective material, to design innovative enrichment devices.

Enrichment plays a crucial role in promoting the physical and mental wellbeing of the animals in our care and animal care team members work tirelessly to develop engaging activities that mimic natural behaviors. Throughout the workshop, animal care team members worked together to build and test PVC-based enrichment structures and solve problems related to durability, safety and animal engagement. With the skills and knowledge gained from this workshop, our animal care team members are now better equipped to design creative, safe and effective enrichment items, helping to ensure that our animals continue to thrive in a stimulating environment.

Our teams recently made an important contribution to conservation and technology by installing a radiotelemetry monitoring tower on the roof of our Robert B. Daugherty Education Center as part of the international Motus Wildlife Tracking System. Funded through a grant from the North American Songbird SAFE initiative, the Motus system consists of a global network of monitoring towers that record movements of migrating animals (primarily birds, bats and insects) that have been previously tagged with a small device. The towers collect data to better understand population size, migration patterns and habitat utilization.

We are one of more than 100 members of the North American Songbird SAFE, which has the goal of reducing the threats to North American songbirds and securing sustainable wild populations of these species throughout their ranges.

The Zoo’s Motus tower is now live.  To see more about our tower, and any updates on animals being tracked by our tower, visit: https://motus.org/.  Once you are there you can zoom in on the map on the home page to find our tower, click the yellow dot for our tower, and visit the “table” page to see who has flown by.

Keeper Taylee finished working on the Emperor scorpion enclosure and got the animals into their new home. She did a beautiful job!

At this size, the blue death feigning beetle larva doesn't even register on the 0.00g scale. It will grow to 0.40g before becoming an adult.

A newly emerged adult blue death feigning beetle. This animal was hatched and raised at the zoo.