Tuesday Night at the Zoo - Part 5

Last night was Dr. Richard Reading’s presentation on the Bactrian Camel at The Alaska Zoo, part of our Tuesday Night at the Zoo program.

We were all very excited to have Dr. Reading come speak at our zoo for several reasons. Not only is he the first to speak of these animals for us (very interesting creatures, to say the least) but he is the also scientist I worked with in Mongolia when I went to study the Argali sheep! He is based at the Denver Zoo, but works all over the world on various projects – one of which is the Bactrian Camel project he spoke on last night.

He began his talk giving a brief description of Mongolia, since most people don’t really know that much about the place. Turns out Mongolia is roughly the same size as Alaska and sits on the same latitude as the line that divides the U.S. from Canada. It has wild temperature swings ranging from 65 below in the winter to over 100 in the summer, and 40 degree swings in a 24-hour period are not uncommon! The bulk of the Mongolian population live in Ulaanbaatar, their capitol city, with the remainder living a nomadic life out on the Steppes.

He then told a bit about some of the research he’s involved with, on animals like the argali, the ibex, and some other larger animals, as well as the smaller ones like the pallas cat, foxes, wolves, and even the hamsters and hedgehogs native to the area. His favorite subject is birds, and he works with several of them over there as well: the cinereous vulture, with the 10-foot wing span, is truly an impressive bird!

From there he moved on to the camel research, mostly describing just how difficult it is to even find the animal, let alone research it. The area where they live is a vast open plane that covers an area equivalent to roughly four Yellowstone parks! Add to that the fact that there may be less than 1000 of them left, and you can see how difficult it can be. That doesn’t take in to account the mechanical difficulties you can encounter. If you’re 250 miles out in the middle of nowhere when your vehicle breaks down – you better know how to jerry-rig it to limp it back to town somehow!

The question and answer part of his presentation was rather up-staged by the arrival of our female Bactrian camel, Tula. She is elderly and arthritic (she’s 15 years old, which – according to Dr. Reading – is quite old) but is still a beautiful animal. The kids all got a chance to either pet her or feed her a twig of birch tree browse.