Category Archive

Hawaii is a part of the tropics, sure, but it’s not a place you would visit expecting to find tigers. Fortunately for vacationers, they aren’t roaming around free–instead they’re livening things up at the Honolulu Zoo.

We’re offering a great connection to a tiger quiz there at the zoo this week in our newsletter, the eSafari, and we highly recommend that you give it a try to test your tiger smarts. When you’re finished, the tiger fun isn’t over. The Honolulu Zoo is also offering a downloadable board game on tigers that will be a good time for the whole family.

That’s only the beginning of the enrichment opportunities through the zoo. Check out this page for a plethora of videos, photos, and stories on the enrichment activities that have been provided for the tigers there in Honolulu. And you can read the Zookeeper’s journal, too, to gain a more scientific handle on tigers and their plight as one of the fastest-disappearing animals on the earth.

Share with us any tiger nuggets you find on your own–it will be a great complement to your reading of this month’s Zoobooks issue, Tigers. Thanks, Honolulu Zoo!

Few of us can personally visit all of the zoos in America, but almost all of us can visit online. And the National Zoo is clearly eager for online visitors!

Because our Zoobooks issue this month is Apes, we suggest you start with the zoo’s primate pages first. There you’ll find ape jigsaw puzzles, coloring pages, fact sheets, e-cards, photo galleries, and a gorilla cam, just to get things going. If all that clicking doesn’t wear you out, move on to the pages that explain how some primates got their names; chances to “meet” the primate staff; and opportunities to learn about the individual apes housed there at the National Zoo. We guarantee you’ll have a swinging good time!

More seriously, the National Zoo is very concerned about and involved in ape conservation. Counting all species together, there are fewer than half a million apes left in the world. Educating children about apes and their value on our planet can only be positive, and this zoo, hand-in-hand with your Zoobooks issue, is a great place to start learning.

The Woodland Park Zoo promotes the rather surprising idea that one third of all global greenhouse emissions are caused by the food we choose to eat! We’ve known for a long time that recycling and water conservation are critical, but who would have guessed that something as basic as our diet could affect our planet?

This month, our Zoobooks issue Endangered Animals has us thinking about how to help our environment, so Woodland Park’s tips on how to “eat like an animal” come at a perfect time.  You’ll find that their suggestions will not only make for a healthier planet, but for a healthier YOU, too.

Beyond this, the zoo has plenty of ideas on what you can do in your own backyard to create and enhance habitat for wildlife. The best part is that all these suggested changes mean fun family projects and (in the case of a food garden) a return to self-reliance that is a great example for children.

We’d love to hear which of these ideas you decide to try, and the outcome of your efforts. Feel free, too, to post a photo on our facebook page! We’d love to see your projects grow.

We’ve been looking forward to sharing with you the mystery and fun going on at the Minnesota Zoo. They’ve got a tiger on the loose! This not-so-real catastrophe is happily coinciding with our Zoobooks Big Cats issue, and it offers kids and parents alike the chance to follow a series of clues to try to find the missing tiger and return it to its enclosure. Once it is safe, how about working with the zoo to design and build a new exhibit to house it?

Ready to sit back on your laurels now? Well, you’re still not through. Tigers are seriously endangered, and the Minnesota Zoo wants you to work on creating a successful breeding program within their tiger population. Once you’ve succeeded,  the most dedicated of you are going to continue that work beyond the zoo’s walls, tracking poachers and tiger parts in India to help stop the bad guys and help save perhaps the most beautiful big cat on earth.

Lastly, you’re given the chance to BE the tiger. Do you have what it takes to survive poachers and shrinking habitat? We’re counting on you to make it out alive. Let us know how you did!

We’re at that time of year when we might look at the dark and spooky sky to make sure there aren’t any ghosts floating around, even though we know better. At the Georgia Aquarium, however, we can guarantee you’ll see something big and white floating around.

The good news is, it’s not a ghost. It’s a beluga whale.

The beluga is not the Great White Whale of Moby Dick fame, but it is similarly intriguing. Like dolphins, beluga whales seem to have a perpetual smile, and their color–or lack of it–gives their bodies a very doughy look. The Georgia Aquarium kindly offers a terrific “Beluga Cam” so we can watch the antics of these playful mammals whether or not we are ever able to travel to Georgia, or to Artic waters, where these whales live in the wild. Did you know their closest relative is the narwhal–the whale with the long unicorn-like horn sprouting from its forehead? Because of their high-pitched twitter, belugas are known as the canaries of the sea.

Enjoy all the whale information on the Georgia Aquarium website as a complement to your current Zoobooks Whales issue. Feel free to share with us what you’ve learned!

Have you ever had a child at your house offer to perform all the care-giving for a new pet? The reality of that often turns out to require a little more commitment than the child bargained for. Too bad there isn’t a way to demonstrate that commitment ahead of time! Or is there?

The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo wants to offer kids the chance to become an online zookeeper. Sure, it sounds easy, but you’ll be surprised at the care they take to make sure kids know what they’re getting into. It starts with the zoo insisting on approving your application before they will even give you your zookeeper test! They want to make sure they are dealing with someone who really cares about animals and will do their best for them. Once you move on to the test, you’ll find it not only informative, but a bit of a hoot.

Beyond the fun, this zoo also works to empower kids to make a difference in animal conservation. They have a strong list of suggestions for activities and lifestyle changes that will help our planet. Like Zoobooks, they want to see kids learn and grow, so that they can one day take the lead in saving animals.

Quick, do you have a guess? Because here’s the winner: The Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, Florida. This zoo not only caters to growing animals, but to growing people, too. They let visitors get up close to the animals, and they offer several kid-friendly rides. But if Florida is too far away to visit, no worries: you can join some delightful meerkats in a rollicking zoo video overview that includes a baby elephant, chimp, monkey, and manatee.

When you’re through, you can take the Lowry Park koala quiz, which will fill you in on growing koalas, too–plus you can follow the zoo’s instructions to create some koala origami, and play an online koala game. Exposing your kids to additional information on animal babies is a great way to round out the fun of this month’s Zoobooks issue, Animal Babies, and”visiting” a zoo is a great lead-in to next month’s issue: Wild Horses. To get a sneak preview of Wild Horses, click here to turn a few pages.

The Denver Zoo is known for its strong commitment to conservation, and saving endangered animal species is high on its priority list. One aspect of this is the zoo’s cooperation in the Species Survival Plan, administered by the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums. For Denver, that means maintaining 54 SSP animals in its collection, of which 34 are on the endangered species list. One benefit of this multi-zoo collaboration is the ability to share breeding animals between zoos, which allows offspring to be born from two totally unrelated animals.

The Denver Zoo is eager to encourage children and families to develop bonds with the animal world that will make conservation a priority for them, too, and the best way to do that (as Zoobooks has found!) is to make it fun. Saving animal babies need not always be as serious as it sounds–in Denver, it can be as simple as a trip to the zoo, a zoo sleep over, or even saving little animal baby faces as desktop wallpaper. Check your wallpaper choices out here and let us know which baby you would save first!

The Little Rock Zoo in Arkansas has an impressive Birds of Prey show, and they want to share a behind-the-scenes look with you. Click on “videos” and choose “Wings of Wonder” to check out all the care and training that goes into these birds. See some impressive behaviors, too, such as a bird “killing” a plastic snake.

Just as in Zoobooks, the goal at Little Rock Zoo is to stimulate interest and encourage learning. The show manager explains her own journey from a person who did not see birds as anything to be taken seriously, to a person who now has an abiding respect for these animals. These descendants of dinosaurs have a great potential to thrill and impress us, and seeing them close-up, whether in video or in person, can only underline that.

Children can spread the word, too, using Little Rock’s ecards, another way to encourage and continue the fun. And for those who are interested, there is a newsletter, too. It’s a great start to conservation, and it’s the perfect complement to this month’s Zoobooks Birds of Prey issue.