Our first few days with Maddy around were busy with many different tasks around the zoo, from cutting and drilling windbreaks onto the lions' pen whilst they looked on at us licking their lips, to digging a trench and laying a water pipe in one of the paddocks, and trimming all the trees along the driveway from the back of the ute. Basically bits of DIY that I was never trusted to do back home (not that there were lots of lion enclosures requiring my attention in Liverpool), so it was lots of fun.
I also had my first ever driving lesson around the zoo grounds - in an automatic jeep, with no windscreen, mirrors or indicators!! I like to think I took to it like a duck to water, but several run-ins with Lise later, over going too fast, being too heavy on the brakes and accelerating around muddy corners, it seems I wasn't such a natural... "Day! You need to look behind you when you're reversing!".
I picked it up after a couple of days driving round the zoo though and actually made it through the three weeks without a single incident or collision - I shrugged off a couple of very near misses as intuitive male spacial awareness.
The first couple of days also saw our first venture into the camel enclosure...
It was quite a complicated operation to feed the camels, starting with opening the gate so that the jeep could drive in, then closing it without letting our humpback friends escape! Then there was the task of spreading the food boxes out enough so that the deer in the enclosure could get some grub too, before repeating the gate procedure again for our exit. Do you remember the scene in Jurassic Park where the t-rex chases them in the open top jeep? Well this wasnt quite so dramatic but the sight of two big, slobbering, hungry camels chasing behind us trying to get to the boxes of fruit and veg on the back of our jeep was quite scary to be honest!! Needless to say we decided to just tip the boxes over the fence from then on.
Soon Maddy had left and the zookeeper keys were handed over to us! We were sad to see Maddy leave but this was our opportunity to make the job our own and really enjoy ourselves so we were excited. From then on the animal duties took up most of our time for the first week or so as we got used to things. Our days flew by and were pretty fun to be honest, despite being busy, but as the evening came and it got colder we were happy to get showered and around the fire with a glass of Dave's finest bourbon :-)