An immersive, career exploration camp, where kids ages 13-15 will delve into various fields at Zoo Miami! Everyone knows about zookeepers but what about marketing and conservational research? There are so many different parts of the zoo that make it an educational and conservation organization. Join us for this fun journey!
In this camp kids will get hands-on in conservation and research, animal behavior, nutrition, graphics, and more! During camp they will get various behind-the-scenes experiences and talk to various zoo professionals.
We will be exploring a variety of areas in around the zoo. We will cover topics like animal science and what that department does to ensure our animals receive the best care and enriching lives while they are here at the zoo.
This will include learning about enrichment, visiting the animal hospital, talking to a keeper about what they do, planning and making enrichment, participating in a fishing derby, and conducting an ethogram. Topics will also include nutrition; where we will visit the zoo kitchen listen to our amazing nutritionists inform our camper about the importance of a healthy animal diet, create meals for animals, make take home animal snack, budget for animals and watch animal feedings.
We will also spend a day looking at what our horticulture department does. This will include learning what zoo doo is, how and where it is made, and how we use it. As well as visit our orchard where we grow a lot of our own food, do a plant scavenger hunt, and pot some plants to take home. We will also be looking at the work our conservation department does. This will include learning about all their projects, hiking our restored pine rock lands, visiting our lab, visiting our butterfly bunker, creating a bat box, and doing a butterfly count.
Finally, our campers will take all this knowledge a learn about the business side of running the zoo. They will learn about boards, have a mock board meeting to discuss a given budget and where money goes, marketing, creating a new logo for a zoo, developing a new area of the zoo, coming up with a new zoo event, and even planning a zoo camp of their own. All of this is to gradually get them to see more of the behind the scenes work that goes into running a zoo. From the upfront jobs like zoo keeping that people often think about when thinking of zoo jobs to the director's job that makes everything in the zoo run smoothly and continues to bring in guest attendance and money to support our staff and animals.
