Tuesday Night at the Zoo - Part 2

Last night was the second in the Tuesday Night at the Zoo series. It was my first one, however, since I had missed the actual first one while I was in Fairbanks. From the sounds of it, the actual first one was VERY well attended: they had between 80-90 people show up! That’s almost unheard of, but they attribute that to both the subject matter (Polar Bears and Climate Change) and to the fact that our advertizing is a little better this year.

We may not have had such a huge turnout last night, but with 46 people we were still scrambling to get enough chairs and elbow room for everybody!

The title of the presentation was “Drawing Zoo Animals” by the Sketch-n-Safari guys, Leon Rabinovitch & Steve Carson. They spent the hour showing people how to draw all the different zoo animals (with a dragon thrown in for good measure). The audience really seemed to be having a good time.

Setting up for the event was interesting. The education department has been relocated to three different areas around the zoo: Katie’s office is currently still in the old Ed building (which is due to be torn down this summer) but will soon be moved to – I think – the old elephant house. The reptiles and education critters have already been moved there, so she’ll have company when she gets settled in. All the education supplies are either in the garage behind the coffee shop or in various closets scattered around the office building.

Poor Katie: whenever she has a program to put on (which is almost a daily thing this year) she has to run all over the zoo to gather up her supplies. That’s hard enough under normal circumstances, but you throw in the fact that she’s 4 months pregnant and is beginning to feel slightly uncomfortable with it, and that just exacerbates the problem ten-fold!

If anybody is feeling particularly generous at the moment, you might consider donating an electric pencil sharpener to the zoo. That sounds so small and insignificant, but I tell you: we had boxes and boxes of pencils to hand out, and barely a tenth of them were sharpened! We had plenty of tablets of paper, and tons of crayons, pens, and markers thankfully, so everybody had something to write on and with regardless.

We would have preferred to have held the program outside under the big tent, but Alaskan weather is unpredictable at best – so, we erred on the side of caution and put them all in the greenhouse. That seemed to work just fine.