Capybaras, servals, monkeys, sloths, otters, and goats were among the lucky animals treated to seasonal snacks this week in the form of Jack-o-lanterns – with brilliant photo results.
Drusillas Zoo Park near Alfriston offered pumpkins up to some of their animal residents as part of the Zoo’s daily enrichment program – and decided to have a little Halloween fun at the same time.
Keepers hung the carved fruits - lined with the animals’ favorite snacks and treats - in position and patiently waited to see if the animals would line themselves up to create a ‘pumpkin head’ illusion - a creative way of offering the animals additional mental and physical stimulation for the day.
The animals were left to investigate the pumpkins themselves, and a team with cameras sat patiently waiting for the shot to line up
Zookeeper Claudia Farley commented “It’s really important for us to give our animals stimulation and enrichment every day, and many of them already have pumpkin as part of their natural diet. Each day we try to mix it up and provide a new form of enrichment for them, whether it’s scent enrichment using herbs and oils, puzzle equipment, or food presented in new ways like today. It might look like we’re just having fun, but it’s actually a really vital part of our job to continually offer new activities to keep their minds stimulated and encourage them to problem-solve and engage in natural behaviors. In the wild food wouldn’t just be handed to them every day, so this is a great way to make them work for it.”
Colobus monkey Kylo wasted no time snuffling inside for snacks and threw his arms up for the perfect Jack Skellington pose
The pumpkin decorations will not go to waste, as the leftovers will be offered up to many of the Zoo’s 800 exotic animals once the celebrations are over, so they can enjoy a fa-boo-lous time too!
Drusillas Park is a small 10-acre zoo near to Alfriston, in East Sussex, UK. Its exhibits are targeted towards children between 2 and 10 years old with a real focus on educating children and families about the natural world.
The zoo team cares for over 800 wild and domestic animals, including ring-tailed lemurs, sloths, meerkats, red pandas, giant anteaters and penguins. Our keepers work incredibly hard to care for our animals and it requires a serious level of dedication. They do everything from feeding, cleaning and training, to close encounter experiences, education sessions, interviewing for press and helping out with marketing set ups too.
We always try to theme our enrichment activities to seasons and events, and each year we give our animals pumpkins and tend to take photos. We have animals in the zoo who we have done this with every year such as our meerkats, lemurs and otters because they are the easiest to film and always engage.
We saw the viral pumpkin head challenge on TikTok and wanted to switch things up a bit this year anyway, so we decided to challenge ourselves to try and do the challenge with some more unusual animals, even those who don’t usually eat pumpkin such as our servals. It took a lot of planning to get the pumpkins in the right place as a lot of them we couldn’t be in the enclosure so we had to just wait in place and hope for the best!
Serval cat Ninja was tempted into position with a pumpkin lined with catnip
When it comes to the animals doing the challenge, we actually had success with all of them, which we didn’t expect! The only one who didn’t quite make the video was our sloth, Flash, as we unfortunately didn’t have the video camera ready in time, and we only had the one very quick moment in which to capture it as we let the animals choose whether to engage or not and she lost interest quite quickly.
Baby capybara Satsuma posed perfectly in position
We also theme our enrichment all the time to events and seasons – we’re currently planning something fun for Christmas with our animals too!
Sloth Flash investigated the arrival of the pumpkin which was specially carved with an upside down face for her
Beaver Norbert was so enthusiastic about his pumpkin treat that he almost stole it and ran away!
Pygmy goat Billy enjoy munching pellets from the half pumpkin, creating a spooky hooved creature
Baby capybara Satsuma really did steal the show with the most pumpkin head poses!
