Zoo Science at the Tallahassee Museum

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As an ecology producer, my job takes me down rivers, out to sea, and into remote corners of north Florida forests and savannas. My mission is to document wildness. And yet, sometimes, I find myself bringing a camera to the Tallahassee Museum.

If you’re reading this and you’ve never been to Tallahassee, let me describe what longtime residents still call the Junior Museum. Half of it is a collection of historic buildings. You can visit a north Florida homestead from the 1800s, an old church, or the home of Princess Murat, a woman with family ties to George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte.

The other half of the Tallahassee Museum is a zoo for Florida native animals. In keeping with the old Florida theme, a couple of the animals- red wolves and Florida panthers- are critters that have long since disappeared from our area. I come here to document these apex predators missing from our north Florida ecosystems.

The Museum is a place where we can see many animals that don’t often let themselves be seen, or that we see only fleetingly. We can see bears, wild turkeys, bobcats, river otters, and, once, the animal staff put me in an enclosure with a couple of skunks.

We see the animals in their exhibits, but we don’t always see the work that goes into caring for them. In the time I’ve spent here documenting wildlife, I’ve learned a lot about a science that I had not previously known existed: zoo science.

Meet the animal staff at the Tallahassee Museum

Suzie Buzzo, Animal Curator at the Tallahassee Museum.

Shelby Bush, Animal Operations Supervisor at the Tallahassee Museum.

Those are the guests in the studio, along with three box turtles and one two-year-old alligator. At the museum, we also meet Barkley the Beaver, a new resident that isn’t in an exhibit, and- drum roll please- the new guest animals! We’ll see many other animals as well, and learn the latest on the Museum’s red wolf family.

Coast to Canopy blog posts are curated transcripts. My notes appear in italics.

What does it take to care for a wild animal in captivity?

Suzie Buzzo: We do the all the care and the husbandry. We do a lot of the medical stuff that we need to do with these animals. So, it’s not just we come in and we clean up poop and feed. There’s so much more that goes into it. We try to give them a good quality of life by enriching their environment.

We do training that improves their wellbeing and their welfare, depending on the species. For instance, we do training with our river otters. We try to get them to a place where we can do voluntary injections. So, we have a tube in the back. We do target training. They’re very responsive, they react to it and it gives them stimulus.

It gives them something exciting to do with their day. There’s all sorts of training and enrichment things that we do to just try to improve their quality of life.

We’ll get more in depth with animal enrichment in just a bit.

The setting: “Native animals in naturalistic habitats”

Shelby Bush: We display mainly native animals in naturalistic habitats. Literally have just tried to put fences around nature. Some can have trees to climb in. These guys like to dig and, bury themselves when it gets cold.

Suzie Buzzo: We use the natural settings of the lake. The deer can swim through parts of Lake Bradford. Some of the other animals have the lake enclosure as well. The bears can swim in their lake or their pool that was manmade with a waterfall, you know, fun and pretty.

But it gives them options.

Shelby Bush: When we have to build a new exhibit… our aviaries were destroyed by hurricane several years ago, so we had a blank slate to work with. But we try and put in as much of the natural props, or exhibit furniture as some folks will call it, to make it appropriate for their disabilities or, injuries, but still to exhibit as many of their natural behaviors as possible.

Plants, water, climbing.

Suzie Buzzo: Yeah, whatever they need… It’s not the same for every animal. It’s not the same what you need for the birds of prey as it is for the foxes or the bobcats.

Animal enrichment

Suzie Buzzo: I feel like we do more enrichment for the mammals than the reptiles. For the reptiles, we try to switch things out in their enclosure or maybe add… even add a tiny drop of a smell of something. But we can change substrates. We can change little sticks or props or plants, for the reptiles.

I ask Suzie what she means by substrates.

Suzie Buzzo: It’s sand or mulch or it could be leaves or whatever else we want.

Suzie Buzzo: It can be so many things… So, does it affect a sense? We have a whole- I know we showed you one of the years when you came out filming- but we have a whole cabinet full of different spices and smells. Shelby’s pulling some stuff out [on the table in the studio]. She pulled out some curry powder.

Curry powder is one that the Panthers always love. And different perfumes. She’s got some Obsession. It’s a very popular one for large cats. One of our former bears loved the stinkiest, nasty, cheapest men’s musk you could ever find.

It doesn’t have to be the expensive stuff.

Shelby Bush: It can be predator / prey, not interactions. You never want to scare anyone, but helping to elicit the prey caution and alertness, or the predator stalking

Feathers can work as that type of thing [Shelby holds up turkey feathers, which would excite a predator species].

Suzie Buzzo: Our cougars, Remy and Roy, they both love the smell of fox urine. That’s one of their favorites. Our otters, believe it or not, even though it’s more of a predator to them, our female otter loves the smell of panther pee.

Toys, blood popsicles, and palm frond tamales

Suzie Buzzo: During the summer, we love making popsicles, blood popsicles or fish juice popsicles. We even freeze crickets and mealworms into things. It’s not blood from an animal, but it’s blood that comes out of the meat that we feed the carnivores.

Shelby Bush: Enrichment can also be toys. These are actually from a wonderful recycling project. These are buoys that have washed ashore in northern Japan. A former zookeeper and her partner were located at the army base there. And they would actually pick these up off of the beach, clean them. And, zoos can pay for shipping to get them.

Suzie Buzzo: So we basically paid for the shipping and she shipped. We have huge ones too. And the Panthers really like them. There’s one in the bear holding area right now in her bed for her to hold on to while she sleeps. But the Panthers like them because they can stick their teeth in and carry them around.

Box Turtles on the loose

Suzie Buzzo: A lot of the animals we get at the museum come from different places. Every once in a while, some of these turtles, they’ll come from someone who had them as a pet and couldn’t keep them anymore. The female over there was actually attacked by a dog and has some shell damage that had to be repaired.

Rob Diaz de Villegas: [Dragonfly is] little. But you were saying, how old is he?

Shelby Bush: He is supposedly around 25 years old. Somebody found him as a baby and kept him. He looks in pretty good condition for most of the ones that we get that are captive kept. But, there are some things that are a little bit off with him. A little bit overgrown beak. The nails are a little overgrown… you can see that he’s very, very tiny. But otherwise, for those of you who can’t see, he fits in the palm of my hand. No fingers.

Suzie Buzzo: Most of the animals were either injured as baby or orphaned as babies. They went to wildlife rehabilitators, and then they deemed them non releasable. So we don’t do the rehab ourselves. But if a wildlife rehabilitator calls us and says, we tried and this animal cannot be released, whether it’s a eagle and it can’t fly well enough to catch prey or… blind in one eye, or whatever the injury is.

That’s when we take them and give them a forever home in a natural setting.

Saying goodbye to Buddha, the Florida panther

Earlier this year, the Tallahassee Museum had to put their 14-year old Florida panther to sleep.

Suzie Buzzo: It’s the hardest part of the job, for sure. We do give them this forever home, and they stay with us their whole lives. We really do get attached. And yeah, you get attached to some animals more than others. It just happens that way. Same with your own pets. And Buddha was extremely special.

I think he was special to every single one of us. Certain [animals] are like, I really love this one, but other people don’t love him as much. But everybody who met Buddha, loved Buddha. He just had one of those personalities that, he purred for everyone. So you got some good purring on video one time, I remember.

So that was tough. We know in the end, we did what was best for him. We didn’t want him to have to suffer. But, we all needed to take a week off after that one. That was very difficult for us.

Shelby Bush: Keeping is definitely a passion job.

Suzie Buzzo: Yeah. We don’t do it for the money.

Shelby Bush: You’re never going to get rich. Your richness just comes from your interaction with them. It’s one of the hardest working jobs. You’ll still go home smiling. You may be stinky, disgusting, covered in who knows what. But, for the most part, you go home happy knowing that you’ve done what you can.

The animals return the favor a lot of time for the hard work with their attitudes, or even just watching our little turtles and their interactions with each other. But yeah, it will also break your heart.

Barkley the beaver, a new animal at the Tallahassee Museum

Suzie Buzzo: We have a new beaver. He’s an ambassador animal. He doesn’t have a large exhibit out on display, but his name is Barkley, and he actually came from South Georgia, but they are all around our area. Somebody in the [Georgia] Department of Natural Resources was taking a hike, and little tiny baby beaver came up to the back of his leg.

So the guy’s like, where did you come from? He kept walking up and down the river, and it turns out they found a Beaver dam exploded by dynamite. We got a call from a rehabber up there who’d known I’d always wanted to have a beaver. So she, sent us a picture of this adorable little, tiny, fluffy brown thing and said, do you want him?

We learned very quickly what we needed to do. I didn’t even know at the time they made powdered beaver milk, so I had to order that right away. I wish we could have brought him to the studio, but he still needs a little more work.

We have an area for our ambassador animals to go. And we have a small pool out there, so we walk him out there, and we do programs with him, but otherwise he has a pool and everything in his behind the scenes area. Beavers are really important to the landscape. And so we wanted to make sure we could talk about them.

Shelby Bush: Beavers generally stay with their family for about two, two and a half years. So even though he’s probably close to full grown, he’s still very much a toddler.

Red Wolf update

We’ve covered the Red Wolf Recovery Plan before, and so I’ll share the brief version here. Red wolves were declared extinct in the wild in the 1970s. The US Fish and Wildlife Service captured 14 wolves to start a breeding program to try and bring them back. Starting with so few individuals, they devised a plan to ensure that only the least-related wolves would breed over the ensuing decades. Because of this, wolves are constantly moved to different facilities to form new pairings or, if their DNA is well represented, to unpair wolves.

There are currently over 300 wolves in captivity. Wolves have been released in North Carolina’s Albemarle Peninsula, by the Alligator River. Releases stopped for a few years when the wolves kept being hunted, mistaken for coyotes. They have since resumed. There are an estimated thirty wild red wolves in North Carolina presently.

When a litter of red wolf puppies was born at the Museum in 2017, I documented their first year. One of the pups, Ranier, became the breeding male at the Museum, and last year he sired two pups- one male and one female.

Suzie Buzzo: This year, in July, [The Red Wolf Recovery Program] said, okay, well, we don’t want mom and dad to breed again. So, they had to split them up because it also became the time that the young were old enough to breed.

They didn’t want the young to be able to breed with their parents or anything like that. So they decided, at the Tallahassee Museum, we were going to keep the mother Arrow and her daughter Artemus, and then dad Rainier that was born with us in 2017, he he just moved with his son, Apollo.

Shelby notes that the Florida-born male wolves are now in Minnesota, where the wind chill was, at the time of our recording, negative 15 degrees.

The Tallahassee Museum’s new guest animals: Binturongs!

Suzie and Shelby drove the red wolves north the week recorded the podcast. On their way back, they picked up new guest animals.

Suzie Buzzo: The exhibit is probably going to be opening on December 20th, and we are getting two binturongs. We just brought them in last night.

Rob Diaz de Villegas: Describe a binturong. It doesn’t sound like a name of an animal most people know.

Suzie Buzzo: They’re also called Asian bear cats. But they’re not a bear or a cat. These two are probably around 30, 35 pounds. They’re black and shaggy. [Binturongs are] actually the largest mammal with a prehensile tail. So, they can hold onto things with their tail. They’re very good climbers, mostly arboreal. And they’re pretty cool looking.

Some people say they smell like buttered popcorn, but I just think they… I don’t know, they smell like something Hopefully they’re going to be fun. They really enjoy eating bananas. So I think that’s going to be their favorite, favorite treat with us. We’re finishing up their exhibit now and getting it all ready for them.