- Ever wonder how the food's prepared for the Pygmy hippo?

Let's go behind the scenes here at the John Ball Zoo.

- Essentially, what I do is manage all of our animals' nutrition.

So what we call the commissary is essentially the zoo's kitchen for all of our animals.

- [Shelley] Because they have to eat.

- They do.

- And they have to have special diets, many of them?

- [Shakira] Every single day.

Most of them have to eat and they do have very specialized diets, many of them even have their own special type of formulated feeds that we order in, and they eat all sorts of different fruits and vegetables as well.

- So how did you learn this craft?

- I went to school to essentially become a zookeeper.

So I knew I wanted to work in a zoo for quite a while, and then from there I ended up here at the John Ball Zoo working in our commissary, and I've stayed here for quite a while.

- [Shelley] So let's take the Pygmy hippo for example.

All right, you've walked in at eight in the morning.

How do you prepare the meal?

- [Shakira] Every animal has their own diet sheet.

We have them all in our computer system.

- [Shelley] According to their names?

- According to their names, yeah, they have their own individual identification number as well.

From there, our prep consists of pulling all the produce that they might need, reading our ingredient list off the chart, and measuring everything out to the gram.

So their diets are all pretty specific.

- What are they eating?

- [Shakira] They do eat a lot of lettuce.

That's definitely the bulk of their produce diet.

Cucumber, they do celery as well, and then sweet potato and carrot are the regulars, and then here and there, their keepers can actually request other food items a few times a month for different enrichment.

So something they don't get every day, so maybe it's something like a big melon that can float in their pool, something interesting for them to interact with.

- And of course, this is seven days a week, 24 hours a day?

- Essentially, yeah, essentially.

We have someone here even on the holidays, even on our own birthdays sometimes just to make sure that everybody's fed and well taken care of.

- [Anna] My name is Anna Kohns, and I am the grounds and warehouse manager at John Ball Zoo.

- Wow, well, by the look of the grounds, you're doing a pretty darn good job.

Congratulations on this gig.

- Well, thank you so much.

We have a great time taking care of everything behind the scenes and all of the guest facing areas, so we have our hands full, but it's a beautiful, beautiful place and a beautiful job.

- [Shelley] What do you do for the animals?

- [Anna] For the animals, most of what we do has to do with moving products throughout the zoo, and so we have the privilege of delivering the animals' diets every single morning.

- All right, give me an example.

How do we deliver a lunch to the meerkat?

- Everything actually gets delivered in the same way.

Very first thing in the morning, it will be packaged up by our wonderful commissary team, and what we do is we load it onto our vehicles, and we take it throughout the zoo, and we place it usually in an internal holding for the zookeepers to deliver on schedule.

- [Shelley] And how about for the pygmy hippo?

- [Anna] Well, the pygmy hippos have a lot of different dietary things.

We see the commissary make very special things for like occasions, like a birthday or things like that that I've seen bring out.

But for the hippo, we take it right to the back of their enclosure, and we deliver it.

And like I said, the zookeepers do feed out the snacks to the animals, but we just make sure that it's there in the morning for them.

- What else do you do to your grounds to either make the grass look extra green, or make things look extra pretty?

- We have a wonderful horticulture team with a lead horticulturist that has a ton of experience in making things look beautiful all year round.

So there's a lot of consistent care that goes into just beautifying the spaces.

A lot of it is a lot of natural beauty, so the plants have been planted in a way where they sort of bloom in a staggered fashion, where every single part of the season there are different things that will be in season and in bloom.

Other than that, we just maintain lawns like you would probably at a golf course.

We aerate, and we mow, and we weed whip.

- [Shelley] What about like the spider monkeys?

Their land needs horticulture, correct?

- Correct.

All of the inside of our enclosures are taken care of by our horticulture team, and then the cleaning and the maintaining is done by the zoo keeping team.

The spider monkey island itself it gets emptied and pressure cleaned quite often to make sure that water stays clean and nice for everybody.

- What about where your great lion lives?

- He lives, well, he's outside during the day, as you can all see, but he stays indoors during the evenings as well.

- And again, there's attendance, there's attending to his decor as well.

- [Anna] Yep, yep, and also managed by our horticulture team.

- [Shelley] What do you get out of this opportunity?

- I love seeing how the behind the scenes works to serve our guests, so all of the smiles that happen during the day are really supported by what happens kind of behind the scenes, and and what we do to make sure that everything is clean and nice so that it's not distracting.

When a guest comes in, they can really have their focus set on our animals and on our mission, and what we're really trying to express, and that they never would be distracted by a trash can that's too full, or a grass that's too long, or anything like that.

- And what can your visitor do to make your job easy?

- Visiting the zoo, if you wanna make the waste stream recyclers job really easy is to make sure you're looking at the labels of the thing that you're eating or drinking out of and when you're disposing of it, to make sure that it matches all of our marked bins, whether it be the compost, the landfill, or a recycling receptacle.

It's a huge help to us to not have to sort it on the back end.

- And don't feed the penguin.

- Certainly not.

No.

The penguins get fed plenty on their own.

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