- Conservation is truly the heart of everything we do here at the North Carolina Zoo.

- I think that anytime we can get a guest to connect with an animal, they learn how to care about it.

And if they care about it, they're probably going to do more to help preserve and conserve wildlife.

- The reality of it is the wild is disappearing at rapid rates.

Habitats are being destroyed for all kinds of different purposes.

We need to promote education, we need to promote passion in the general public to make sure that these habitats are restored and conserved in stable situations for all these species.

- That's the deeper mission of what we're trying to do.

We really are trying to save wildlife and wild places around the world.

[Music] ♪ - The North Carolina Zoo is magical and it's special because of everything that we do.

It's a beautiful place to visit and this is a place where the animals are a priority as well.

What that has translated to is we're the world's largest natural habitat zoo.

- We love to give the animals choice and control.

Giving them that ability to choose what they want and how they want to experience it, that's a big part of being a zookeeper now.

- Just the conservation aspect paired with animal behavior really interests me, as well as taking care of wildlife every day.

- The keepers are remarkable.

They form really, really strong bonds with these animals.

- There you go.

That's not scary.

- Our day-to-day looks different every day, depending on what the animals need and what we have going on.

- We're in the grizzly bear habitat and we are just going to kind of clean up and reset his habitat, put out some enrichment that has some of his diet in there.

It's either cleaning holdings, picking up hay, doing diets for the next day.

So this is alfalfa and then they get a mix of timothy as well.

- It's a lot of cleaning, it's a lot of hard work.

It's a lot of lifting hay bales and logs and sticks and doing all these great things for the animals.

- They can chew on it.

It's a really good source of calcium.

They can also play with it.

We see the wolves playing tug of war with it.

I think that if you understand where these animals are coming from and all of their stories, like majority of these animals wouldn't be alive if the zoo wasn't an option for them.

Atta girl, Luna.

- Zoos don't pull animals from the wild now unless it's an actual conservation or if they're injured for some reason.

Both our grizzly and our black bears here were rescued situations.

That's where zoos play that big part is they can take in these animals and give them a home to finish out their lives.

- Good job.

- Training is a way to stimulate the minds of a lot of the animals.

- This is Luna.

We're about to do a training session.

- In the Northwood section, we train all the animals we can.

So we train both bear species.

We train the bison, the elk.

If there's an animal, you can try to train it.

- See, I have meat and other fun stuff in there.

- You just need to find that right reinforcement, that right thing that makes an animal motivated.

- Up.

Good job.

So it can be anything from behaviors that are just for like relationship building between us and the animals.

It can also be stuff for cognitive stimulation.

Reach.

Good.

Hold.

- A lot of our training is focused around medical care, getting them to participate in their own health care.

So you're going to see us like train them to open their mouth so that we can see all their teeth and see how those look.

Put their paws up so you can see the bottom of their pads.

We're trained to take a hand inject into their shoulder so that we can give them vaccines or different antibiotics.

- For Luna, she can hold her mouth open while we spray some mouth flush solution in there.

And that's been really helpful.

We're also working on a toothbrush behavior, which she can do really well in the front half of her mouth.

And we're working towards being able to brush the back molars as well.

So that can really help out her dental care.

- Good girl!

- We're actually a state-owned facility.

So one of the things that allows us to do is we've tried unique things that you're not going to see at a lot of other zoos just because we have the time and the keeper staff to work through it.

- Do you want to go find Annie?

We'll go find her first.

Yeah, so Annie, one of our bison, she started presenting some allergies.

And the way that the allergies show up with her is she gets really itchy.

When she does get itchy, she likes to scratch her face on things.

Unfortunately, that results in her tearing up the area around her eyes.

And then that attracts all of the flies.

So we tried a couple different fly solution remedies, and they worked a little bit, but nothing was really allowing it to fully heal.

So I'm going to take off her old mask, and then I'm going to do her medications.

And then we'll put on the new mask, depending on how tolerable she is today.

Hi, pretty girl.

- The keepers decided they wanted to try to put a fly mask on after they saw a rhino wearing one.

We're like, "Well, nobody's done a bison before, so let's give it a shot."

- Hi, pretty mama.

How you doing?

First and foremost is our safety and Annie's safety when we're doing this.

Having someone else touch an area that, for a bison, is not something that happens very often.

How do you feel about this one?

So we want to make sure that we're working safely in and around her, giving her the space and reading her behavior as well.

Like today, if she didn't want to wear it, then she has that choice and control to walk away and not participate.

That's up to her.

I know you're not having it.

It took a lot to build that relationship with her, but watching her work through that was really, really cool.

- So the fly mask keeps those flies away.

I make it so it's harder for her to itch her eyes, which helps heal up better.

And they trained it, they did it, she wears a fly mask.

- Okay, Chica, that's it.

Thank you.

So it's just very rewarding as a keeper in that aspect that we do get to create those bonds.

She is pretty.

Look at her fly.

- And that's something that North Carolina Zoo just has, is that we have this big keeper team that allows us to really take care and look at the animals and spend some time with them and actually do a job that we should be doing.

[Music] So here at the North Carolina Zoo, we have several native, regional conservation projects.

We do bird watch, we do frog watch, we do all these different local biodiversity projects just to promote good, healthy habitats here.

- Our philosophy is we're not going to have animals here at the zoo without having a program that is saving those animals and the water.

Another really cool aspect of the job is actually getting to participate in red wolf conservation.

- We have the second largest group of red wolves in the country.

We have 23.

- They are the most critically endangered canid in the world.

And they're only found in the wild here in North Carolina.

- The American red wolf population at one point was declared extinct in the wild.

The last 13 were actually rescued and they were all brought into a zoo in Tacoma, Washington to start the recovery program, to start the breeding program there.

So North Carolina Zoo was able to participate in that by having 11 different spaces for these wolves to live in.

- You can see the red wolves on Habitat.

Those are our forward-facing animals, if you will.

And then we have got close to 20 behind the scenes where we keep them away from humans.

We interact with them as minimally as possible because these are the red wolves that hopefully will be released back into the wild.

- Red wolves are pretty shy, actually.

If there's a human around, they're just going to tuck away in their den or stay as far away from you as possible.

But if you watch them on camera when we're not around, they can be kind of goofballs.

They're highly social.

They'll be grooming each other, laying near each other, playing keep away with sticks.

They're very inquisitive.

- It's important because this is a keystone species in its native range, in its habitat.

You see disease spread across deer populations because there's not your top keystone predator picking off these sick, weak individuals.

And that's something the red wolves can help out with.

Reintroducing this species that helps control these populations is going to make healthier habitats in the long run.

So that's our big purpose here is to help produce new individuals to release back to the wild.

One of the most successful ways to reintroduce a large carnivore or a canid like the red wolf is to actually take a puppy from an under-human care born litter, bring it out to the wild and give it to a new mom.

And she accepts it.

She will raise that puppy as a wild wolf.

This last year, we took our puppies here from the zoo, we brought it out to U.S.

Fish and Wildlife.

They gave that puppy to the new mom.

That mom did a good job and actually raised that puppy up.

And it's still living out there.

And that's a big conservation win for us.

Since 2016, we've had the most puppies born under human care in the country.

Total, we've had 69 red wolves born here at the North Carolina Zoo.

To kind of put that into perspective, there's only around 300 total wolves between the wild and human care right now.

Knowing that we're such a big part of that program, it's just an incredible feeling.

- When you form a connection with an animal, you care.

You begin to care about them.

And then our hope is to extend to acting and doing the things that we need to do to save them.

- Hi!

[high pitched whistle] [laughing] - At the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do.

We're trying to make a better world for these animals.

- There you go, pretty girl.

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