Boat Bumpers Bust Boredom

Mei Li enjoys breakfast

Have you ever seen a bored zoo animal pacing back and forth in its exhibit or staring into space? The keepers at the Binghamton Zoo use enrichment to keep our animals entertained. Enrichment can be novel foods, scents, toys, or environmental stimuli.

As part of a new enrichment program, we are using donated boat bumpers to stimulate our animals. Our red panda pair loves browsing for their morning bamboo from their hanging boat bumper feeder. Annabelle and Polly, our constantly hungry guinea hogs, take longer to eat when their yams are stuffed inside a boat bumper. Longer feeding time means less time pestering the keepers for more food! The golden lion tamarins, Tanner and Ludwig, utilize natural foraging behaviors by pulling mealworms out of holes cut in a boat bumper. This behavior imitates pulling bugs out of rotting logs in the South American rainforest where these tamarins are normally found.

Because these bumpers are sturdy enough to keep a boat from hitting a dock, we don’t mind if some of our animals “play rough” with them. Our river otters, Leroy and Elaine, wrestle with a boat bumper, trying to get out the fish chunks hidden inside. Koosaka and Terney, our Amur tiger sisters, rip apart their boat bumpers to get to delicious fish and hamburger pieces.

Koosaka and Terney labor to tear down a hanging boat bumper

I have been working on an enrichment article about reusing boat bumpers for Animal Keepers’ Forum with Keeper Pattie Beaven from Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, WA. The article will hopefully be published in the October issue, and I will post a copy at that time.

Keeping captive animals entertained is a full-time job!