As part of our ongoing video series with Edinburgh Zoo, we visited the popular capital attraction to learn more about the animals there and see what a typical day for the zoo keeper entails.
In this episode, we visited the tiger enclosure where me met male tiger Lucu and zoo keeper Helen Martin - one of the zoo’s longest serving members of staff.
In this episode, we visited the tiger enclosure where me met male tiger Lucu and zoo keeper Helen Martin - one of the zoo’s longest serving members of staff.
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00:00Hello and welcome to our mini-series about Edinburgh Zoo.
00:09In each episode we'll meet a different species and speak to their keepers about what a typical
00:14working day is like for them. In this episode we're heading to the tiger enclosure to see one
00:21of the world's largest carnivorous animals up close. We'll be speaking to animal keeper Helen
00:26Martin, one of the zoo's longest serving members of staff, and meeting Luku, a male tiger who
00:32arrived at the zoo in 2020. And on our arrival Luku was enjoying his afternoon snack.
00:41So what we just gave him was little chunks of horse meat and that is just a snack. His normal
00:46feed would be like a big joint of horse with the bone and the fur on it and a horse is what they
00:52mostly get but we also give them things like deer and calf as well. We can present the food in
00:57different ways so sometimes we'll hang it up from the tree branches or we've got some
01:02structures in the enclosure where we can hang things from. We might put it in a paper sack or
01:07a cardboard box so he's got to rip things open to get to it. We can hide it under piles of leaves
01:12or behind rocks and lots of different places within the enclosure where we can we can hide
01:17things and he's got to find them so we'll never put it in the same place. We'll hide in
01:22different places each time we feed them and we'll try to vary the times that we feed them as well so
01:27he's never expecting a feed at a particular time. Does that help with stimulation? Exactly, yeah, yeah.
01:32So if he doesn't know when the food's coming he's not going to be then pacing because
01:37he's expecting a feed at that time. It just keeps him on his toes a little bit
01:41without part of his enrichment.
01:50Feeding times are carefully planned with tigers brought to the inside enclosure while staff
01:55distribute food for their two tigers, Luku and Dharma, and Helen says this potentially
02:00challenging task is made easier by Luku's willingness to return to his den when asked.
02:06We're quite lucky with Luku, he's very good at coming in when you call his name and he'll
02:12just come in, usually anyway, he'll come in and when you call him you can just lock him inside
02:16the house. We're very tight in securities, we'll double check everything before we go out
02:22into the outside enclosure. It's estimated there are as few as 300 tigers remaining in the wild
02:29due to the loss of their habitats and poaching of tigers for illegal trade.
02:34In an attempt to safeguard the future of the beautiful species, staff at the Zoo and across
02:39the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland are carrying out research to help inform
02:44conservation efforts as well as overseeing a breeding programme here at Edinburgh Zoo.
02:50We do have a female here as well, tigers are part of the European breeding programme and we are
02:55trying to get them together as a breeding pair that is recommended that they do breed. So we're
03:01having a little bit of trouble with that at the minute, the male has not been very confident
03:05in the past and we've been putting him together trying to build up his confidence around her
03:10and his other problem is he just doesn't know what he's supposed to be doing unfortunately,
03:14so we're just trying to do as many introductions as we can and hopefully at some point he'll get
03:21the hang of what he's supposed to do. As part of the breeding programme staff monitor the pair,
03:26identifying days when the tigers can be introduced in a bid to help the critically
03:31endangered species. They can see each other every night, they're separated in the house at night just
03:36by a panel of mesh so they can see each other all night long and that gives us a chance to gauge
03:41whether they're ready to go in with each other in the morning and we just try and do introductions
03:46as often as we can, just when we've got people available to do it because we do need to be there
03:51to keep an eye on them and make sure nothing goes wrong and have people
03:56around that we can separate them if we need to if anything goes wrong. It could be
04:02once a week, it could be a few times a week depending on who's available. Whilst working
04:08with the tigers over the years, Helen has noticed visitors misinterpret the tiger's behaviours
04:13as well as learn about some peculiar bug bears the tigers have. I'd say one of the challenges is
04:19visitor perception of what they're doing so sometimes we'll get people assuming they're
04:25stressed because they hear Luku, I had this yesterday, I had Luku, when he's calling
04:33for the female he sounds quite distressed so a lady was very worried that he was distressed
04:38but he was just calling for the female and it just happens that his call is quite mournful
04:44and also sometimes we'll get people saying that they're pacing because they're stressed but it
04:51it just means usually that they've seen a keeper with a bucket and they're thinking
04:56they're going to get a feed so either that or they're patrolling behaviour so we get
05:01often foxes around the back of the enclosure and they just do a little bit of
05:06perimeter patrol, a bit of spraying just to make sure that they're maintaining their territory
05:10boundaries. Luku is a bit of a people watcher and he's just interested in people with
05:17with buggies, we saw him doing that this morning but we do find that big cats have a particular
05:23dislike for people in bobble hats or kids buggies, I'm not sure why that is but it's a
05:30funny thing that they don't like. Join us next time when we'll be returning to Edinburgh Zoo
05:36to meet more animals and their keepers.