It's a Primate Party!

By Brooke Coe, Greater Sacramento AAZK Liaison

Join the celebration! Our young female chimp Maria, is celebrating her 10th birthday this New Year’s Eve, and you can be a part of the celebration. The Greater Sacramento chapter of the American Association of Zoo Keepers (AAZK) will be selling hand or footprints of Maria to benefit Chimpanzee conservation.

Purchase yours at the Member and Visitor Services office and either write a personalized message to her or decorate it! Then come back on her birthday to see it strung up around the exhibit. She will also be tearing apart a paper mache birthday cake and will be enjoying many other birthday treats. Do your part to help wild chimps while celebrating Maria’s 10th birthday!

NOTICE: posted 12/29/10
Maria and the rest of the troop will be let out into their exhibit at 10 am on Friday, December 31st to enjoy the special treats.

Recycle & Transfer Station Tour

By Jaime Wilson, Green Team Member


The Sacramento Zoo Green Team had the opportunity to tour the 140,000 square foot Sacramento Recycling & Transfer Station last week to learn more about how recycling works and gain some insight into what we can do better. The general recycling (paper, cardboard, plastics, glass and metal) that is generated here at the Zoo goes to this facility as well as what is considered hazardous waste (batteries, fluorescent light bulbs, paint).


There are three parts to the station.

• Waste Transfer: The trash truck comes here and drops off the garbage. Then it is loaded into transfer trucks that move 25 tons of trash in each load to the landfill. They move about 1,000 tons of garbage every day!
• Material Recovery Facility (MRF): This is the recycling part. Everything from your recycle bin is dropped off here, moved along a conveyor belt, sorted and then packaged into bails to be sold. They process 450 tons of recycling each day!
• Hazardous Waste: The scary stuff that can't go into the landfill ends up here. They take paint, motor oil, batteries, fluorescent bulbs, aerosols, pesticides, solvents, medical sharps and much more. They sort, package send the items off to be recycled or disposed of properly.

As a resident of Sacramento County, you can drop off large items and appliances (for a fee), and household hazardous waste (free, but limited amounts). Check out their website for hours, fees and details.

Here is a photo tour of how they process all the stuff we put into those recycle bins!

1) The mixed recycling is dumped on the far side, and the cardboard is dumped on the near side.

2) the items are moved by a conveyor belt up to the workers who sort the items. They look for cardboard, trash and contaminated items, and paper. They pull them out and drop them into shoots that lead to the big holding bays below them.

3) Most of the glass is sorted mechanically, crushed and sent down a conveyor to the white collection bin. As one bin fills, they move another one under the constant stream of crushed glass.

4) This set of shoots and ladders mechanically separates out the newspaper, the mixed paper and everything else like plastic bottles, metal cans, etc. Each ends up on it's own conveyor belt.

5) At the far left, there are another set of workers that sort items on each line making sure only the stuff they want is on the belt. The last step is a magnet that takes out the tin cans and metal, and a electrical current that pops out the aluminum cans.

6) As each of the storage bays fill up with the workers items they are put into large bailing machines that will compress and wrap the recycling. Then they are stacked and prepped to be sold to companies that will use the materials to make new stuff!

It is a pretty impressive system and we learned some great things for our everyday green practices.

• Package your shredded paper into clear plastic so that it is properly contained and they can see what it is.
• If you are recycling plastic shopping bags, cram as many as you can into one bag and tie up the bag. That way they can easily grab it off the line and get it into the right place.
• Rinsing your tin cans isn't necessary, but it does help reduce the contamination on other stuff in your recycling bin.
• Take a trip out to Household Hazardous and go "shopping" in their free area. They often have large quantities of household paint, cleaners, and other items that are mostly full or have never been opened!

So, make sure you keep on recycling all those bottles, cans and newspapers! And don't forget to take your scary stuff like used motor oil, latex paint, fluorescent bulbs and batteries to Household Hazardous. It doesn't cost you a dime and it keeps very harmful stuff out of the landfill.

If you don't know what you can recycle, visit http://www.sacgreenteam.com/ and look under "How do I recycle" for tips and information on just about everything!

Gus Says: Thanks Jiffy Lube!

By Gus, the Green Tree Frog

Hi everyone, Gus here... If you don't already know I am the official Blog Frog and green ambassador for the Sacramento Zoo. My good friends on the Green Team have been working hard since 2003 to educate and encourage green practices among the staff, volunteers and docents at the Zoo.

The Green Team set up recycling programs for everything from paper and bottles to batteries and Styrofoam and hand out green awards to staff. They host bike to work days and encourage staff to take a year-long green pledge to make eco-friendly choices. And that is just the beginning! Take a look at everything they do on the Green Team webpage.

And now to the exciting news - Jiffy Lube is now the proud sponsor of the Green Team! Their support will help the Green Team continue the good work and expand their message to the public with a Zoo map recycling station near the exit. The map station will be designed to collect gently used maps that can be reused. Less maps used, means more trees saved!

Jiffy Lube believes in being “Green” and is a leader in the auto service industry. They recycle over 4 million quarts of used oil and other fluids annually. That’s a lot of oil that is kept out of the storm drains and waterways and as a frog, that’s good news!

Visit Jiffy Lube online to find out more about their recycling practices and to get your free oil change coupons!

Saving white lions

A family of extremely rare white lions are about to be released into the wild in a step conservationists hope will save their 'species' from being condemned to captivity.

White lioness Zihra, her mate Mandla and their three one-year-old cubs - sons Zukhara and Matsienge and daughter Nebu - are due to be freed in South Africa within the next few days.

They were each knocked out with an anaesthetic recently so that scientists could collar the big cats. This will help track the pride across the savannah in the future.

Source and More Photos

Man continues to manipulate nature

You would think that we would have learned from past disastrous attempts to try to manipulate Mother Nature.

Alaska has now begun wolf killings to boost caribou for hunters.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game, aiming to boost the survival of caribou calves, wants to kill up to 328 wolves, leaving behind 88 to 103. Killing them, state officials say, will allow the Fortymile caribou herd, ravaged by three years of bad weather and heavy snow, to expand from its current level of 40,000 animals to as many as 100,000.

The predator control effort has run into opposition from the National Park Service who argues that there aren't nearly as many wolves as state officials estimate, and that killing so many could devastate the packs. Also, the park service says that the Fortymile herd hasn't approached 100,000 since the early 1900s.

Wolves in other parts of the West, meanwhile, are also about to come into the gun sights, after the Obama administration's decision this month to let stand the removal of endangered-species protections for wolves in the Upper Midwest, Idaho and Montana.

Source

Here are a few lessons we should have learned from history:

* It is believed that the Sahara Desert has been formed due to the disruption of a food chain. Records point out that in ancient times the Romans captured lions, which resulted in the sharp reduction in the predator population. This in turn resulted in the increase in herbivore population since there was fewer lion to kill them. The increase in the herbivore population led to overgrazing which removed all vegetation. In this manner the Sahara Desert was formed.

* In 1935, a species of toad from Central America was introduced in Queensland (Australia). It was meant to eat beetles that were destroying the sugarcane crop. But not only did the toads eat the beetles, they also ate many other useful and harmless creatures. They ate lizards which help farmers by feeding on insects and also destroyed small frogs which are harmless to crops. Since the toad had no natural predators they multiplied into huge populations which are now destroying the native Australian wild life.

* In Europe, during the middle ages, the cat was considered a symbol of evil. Superstitious people associated the cat with witchcraft and the devil. For this reason, hundreds of thousands of cats were killed. The absence of cats led to a huge increase in the rat population of Europe and contributed to the spread of Bubonic plague. This disease which is transmitted to people by rat fleas killed about a fourth of the people who lived in Europe during the 1300’s.

* Rabbits are not native to Australia. In 1859, 24 wild rabbits were released for hunting purposes. The effect of rabbits on the ecology of Australia has been devastating since this time. Rabbits are suspected of being the most significant known factor in species loss in Australia. Rabbits often kill young trees by destroying their bark. Rabbits are also responsible for serious erosion problems because they eat native plants which leaves the topsoil exposed and vulnerable to sheet, gully and wind erosion.

* In 1960, the mayor of Chicago, Richard J Daley, presented Emperor Akihito (then Crown Prince) with a bluegill fish. It was hoped that the Japanese would learn to love bluegill for dinner as much as Chicagoans do. The emperor donated the fish to research centers, but many escaped to wipe out the royal bitterling and bring other native species to the brink of extinction. They have infested waterways across Japan, including the moat of the imperial palace in Tokyo.

* The following attempt to "fix Nature" may be the saddest of them all:

Things began to go wrong on Macquarie Island, halfway between Australia and Antarctica, soon after it was discovered in 1810. The island's fur seals, elephant seals and penguins were killed for fur and blubber, but it was the rats and mice that jumped from the sealing ships that started the problem. Cats were quickly introduced to keep the rodents from precious food stores. Rabbits followed some 60 years later, as part of a tradition to leave the animals on islands to give shipwrecked sailors something to eat.

Given easy prey, cats feasted on the hapless rabbits and feline numbers quickly grew. The island then lost two endemic flightless birds, a rail and a parakeet. Meanwhile, the rabbits bred rapidly and nibbled the island's precious vegetation.

By the 1970s, some 130,000 rabbits were causing so much damage that the notorious disease myxomatosis was introduced to Macquarie, which took the rabbit population down to under 20,000 within a decade.

The vegetation began to recover, but what was good for the vegetation proved bad for the island's wildlife. With fewer rabbits around, the established cats turned instead to local burrowing birds. By 1985, conservationists deemed it necessary to shoot the cats.

The last cat was killed in 2000, but the conservationists were horrified to see rabbit populations soar. Myxomatosis failed to keep numbers down, and the newly strong rabbit population quickly reversed decades of vegetation recovery. In 2006, the resurgent rabbits were even blamed for a massive landslip that wiped out much of an important penguin colony.

Scientists say the chain of events at Macquarie is an example of a "trophic cascade", the knock-on effects of changes in one species abundance. The next stage could be an "ecosystem meltdown".

The Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service intends to fix the island once and for all, and has drawn up plans to eradicate all 130,000 rabbits, along with the estimated 36,000 rats and 103,000 mice that live there.

When WILL we learn?