A Birthday Party

The Alaska Zoo celebrated our polar bears' birthday this weekend.

They claimed it was their 10th, but I don't think so. For one thing, the two polar bears are not the same age: our female is 3 years older than our male. And it can't be the 10th celebration of the two of them, because we've only had the male about 3-4 years now. But I honestly can't remember exactly how old they are without digging in to my research papers, so I'll let it stand for now. Off the top of my head, I think that Ahpun (the female) is 11 and Lyutyik (the male) is 8 - but I could be wrong, so don't quote me on that.

Regardless of their age, they did have a good party.

Attendance was good, thanks in part to the weather cooperating with us. For weeks we've been breaking records for cold temperatures - but at the last minute they came up to a more reasonable level and people could get out and enjoy themselves without freezing to death.

Some of the volunteers and zoo employees spent several hours ahead of time creating the snow-packed "cake" for them: three tiers standing a good 10-12 feet tall, decorated with fruits & vegetables and colored with food colorings. As always, a toy was hidden deep inside for them to "discover" as they demolish the cake.

On top of the cake was a whole (raw) butterball turkey! Lyutyik went right for that, dragging it off to the side for his own consumption. He pretty much ignored everything else and spent the entire time working on that, leaving Ahpun to pick thru all the other goodies.

Several colorful packages were made for them this year: cardboard boxes wrapped with colorful paper and filled with goodies like peanut butter, fish scraps, and peanuts. Ahpun made short work of opening them to get the goodies out.

For the party guests, we had a few tables set up around the polar bear exhibit offering various forms of entertainment, from coloring pages & mazes to "Make Your Own S'Mores!". We even had a table of polar bear artifacts set out for people, displaying an entire polar bear hide, a skull, and several radio collars.

I sat at the Hot Chocolate table, selling the cups for $1.00 each. Unfortunately I ran out of hot water after about 45 minutes so had to spend the remainder of my 2-hour shift saying, "I'm out of hot water - but our coffee shop will have more." Eventually, I snagged a zoo employee with a radio to call the volunteer coordinator and let her know I needed more. She came right over once she knew, but I could have sold a lot more than I did.

The cutest thing I saw while I was there was this little girl. She came up to my table and dug around in her little purse until she came up with 4 crumpled dollars, telling me that she was buying hot cocoa for her brothers and sisters.

"That's so nice of you! You must be the big sister, to take care of them like that." I said.

She agreed, saying "I may be small, but I'm seven years old!"

"Well, you're a very good big sister." I told her.

I really wondered how she was going to get four cups of hot cocoa down the stairs to where her siblings were at the craft tables, not to mention the fact that I wondered if they even wanted hot cocoa - particularly if they were younger than she was!

Thankfully, her mother arrived and convinced her that they could all share two cups. I gave her back two of her dollars and she was happy with that.