Do zookeepers work at night?
06:58 Share

From the brains behind Brains On is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Penelope Sanders and I'm a pygmy marmoset. Hey everyone. Sorry, we have to be kind of quiet because all my brothers and sisters are sleeping. It's really peaceful here at the zoo at night. All the lights are off. Everyone's calm. It's a good time for us to take a break from seeing so many people. I like to cuddle up in my favorite tree hole right behind this tangle of vines right here.

Here's the thing, though. It's hard for me to go to sleep tonight because my water bowl is empty. Normally, I like to take one big gulp of water right before I drift off to sleep, but there's no water in my bowl. During the day, I can just go like this, and one of the animal keepers will come see what I want and then help me. But tonight, no one is here. I will say, though, sometimes they are here at night, and I'm not sure why. You know, I think I remember listener Amara asking about this. My name's Amara, and I'm from San Francisco.

My question is, do zookeepers work at night? What an interesting question. So the answer is yes and no. Animal keepers do work at night at all zoos and aquariums sometimes. Hi, I'm Nancy Hawks, and I am the director of animal care at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington. So I'll tell you a little bit about the reasons why they might work at night.

But I'm going to start with why they don't typically work at night. We want to give all our animals some peace and quiet and rest. And when the keepers are around, typically,

The animals are so cued to their caretakers. They know them, they trust them. They know that when the keepers are around, they get treats and they get their food and they get a lot of attention. And so at nighttime, we really want them to rest just like all of us. And so we want it to be quiet and we don't want them to be so stimulated.

And that's true even if the animals are nocturnal, which means that typically in nature they would be active at nighttime. And usually for those very nocturnal animals, we have them on a reverse light cycle, right? So they feel like it's nighttime during our daytime, but during our nighttime, they are sleepy. So we really want to give the animals a break.

However, there are some times when we do have staff here at night, sometimes even the whole night. So I'll give you a couple of examples of that. Sometimes an animal being born. We might have the same situation if an animal was sick, where they needed medication overnight. Sometimes we have baby birds that are being hand-reared. Their parents either are overwhelmed or their parents aren't.

around to take care of them. And so we hatch them out in an incubator and they need to be fed very frequently. And so we have our staff take care of that overnight.

Other times we're doing things like introductions where we're introducing new animals to each other. Say a new orangutan has come from another zoo to be paired with an orangutan we have here and it's maybe the first night that we're going to leave them together overnight. We would have keepers stay.

and make sure everything was going smoothly. Every once in a while we have emergencies like a power outage and when we have power outages there are certain things that we need to keep an eye on. Incubators for one, heat levels in some of our buildings and sometimes we have some of our staff stay overnight just to make sure that everything is stable.

An interesting thing is that we have a lot of cameras. We use a lot of cameras in areas where our animals live so that we can see them remotely, even from home. And so sometimes our keepers are at home, but they're looking at the animals through the cameras because there's something going on we want to keep an eye on and we need those expert eyes, those people that really know the animals

to be doing that, but they don't necessarily have to be here at the zoo to do that. I've been at the zoo at night many, many times and it's very, very peaceful. It's very quiet. I mean, the animals are used to a cycle where things settle down at night. And so you can hear owls up in the trees. Sometimes bats are flying around.

Our zoo especially is very park-like, so there is a lot of wildlife that just lives in our zoo. And some of that comes to life at night.

sometimes, uh, Oh, let's say 4th of July when there are fireworks around the city, then sometimes you might hear, say the lemurs start to vocalize, um, or even the lions roar or the tigers would chuff and, um, you know, just sort of responding to that, that noise. But, um, typically it's, it's pretty quiet and very pleasant. Um, uh,

Now that we learned all about what's happening while I'm sleeping, I wanted to tell you a little bit more about me, Penelope Sanders, the pygmy marmoset. We are the smallest type of monkey in the world. On average, we only weigh 4.2 ounces and we're only about 136 millimeters tall. That's shorter than a pencil. Our tails are about half as long as our bodies and have black rings on them. We're typically found in the rainforests of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador. And we can leap 15 feet

feet into the air. So if you ever need me to grab something for you really far up high, I gotcha. If you liked this episode, take a second to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to find out how each of us is related to the beautiful bright beacons in the sky, check out the Brains On podcast where we have a whole episode all about stars. If you have a moment of um question, we would love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time.

Is there a teen in your life who needs a little extra help learning how to manage their finances? Financially Inclined from Marketplace is a podcast you can trust to help Gen Z get serious about money.

I'm the host, Janelia Espinal, and each week I talk to experts about essential and practical personal finance topics, like choosing a college that you can actually afford, finding internship opportunities, and how to start a business while you're still young. Let's make sure the next generation gets these financial lessons sooner than we did. Listen to Financially Inclined wherever you get your podcasts.