Milwaukee's zoo animals celebrate the holidays like humans — ripping open gifts

It was the equivalent — in the ruffed lemur world — of a kid ripping open brightly colored Christmas gift wrap, pulling a new toy from the box, jumping up and down and screaming "Best. Gift. Ever." 

For Morombe, one of the Milwaukee County Zoo's adorable ruffed lemurs, Wednesday was like Christmas morning. And the gift that excited the beady-eyed Madagascar native?

A few bites of a banana.

Just in time for the holidays a group of Zoo Pride volunteers wrapped dozens of boxes in various shapes and sizes, adorned with bows, ribbons and other decorations, and carefully cut small holes for zookeepers to tuck in treats.

Though worms, crickets and dead mice might not be on many human holiday gift lists, they're among the must-have items for the Zoo's residents.

"It's an important part of our animal husbandry. All the animals have enrichment plans," said Cassie Sajkowski, winter quarters zookeeper.

"When we hide food for them it simulates what it's like in the wild where their food isn't sitting on a plate," Sajkowski said.

Enrichment items vary among species. For the big cats it can be perfume because lions and tigers mark their territories with scent. For some birds, like Gomez the marabou stork, it can be straw, which they like to pull out of boxes. For the chinchillas it can be simply an empty box because they love to chew on the cardboard.

The zoo's holiday gift boxes range from food enrichment to encourage foraging behavior to toys for animals to play with after figuring out how to remove them, said Bridget Carpenter, zookeeper at the Northwestern Mutual Family Farm. Her charges include five rabbits, two ducks, four chickens, two cats, guinea pig, barred owl, porcupine, hedgehog, three ferrets, three snakes and three turtles.

"It makes a huge difference for us. Our day is pretty regimented with so much we have to do for the animals, so it really helps to have the volunteers make holiday gift boxes," Carpenter said.

Wednesday morning, half a dozen Zoo Pride volunteers gathered in a storage room in the winter quarters where the camels, tapirs and zebras spend the cold months. Small buckets contained glue made from flour and water, a couple dozen rolls of Christmas wrap were stacked in a corner and wrapping tables contained boxes filled with colored markers and pens, bows, confetti and ribbons.

Because animals will eat or tear apart the boxes, no tape or string is used.

Zoo Pride volunteers save cardboard boxes for several months and bring them from home, plus boxes left over from the commissary are hoarded for the holidays, volunteer Jan Nosse said. 

Outside the room, about 40 gift-wrapped boxes were stacked up waiting for zookeepers to pick them up.

"We put holes in them and the keepers pick out the size they want and put in treats," said Nosse, who admitted she hasn't done any gift wrapping for her family yet.

Zoo Pride volunteers also craft gift boxes for individual animals' birthdays and other holidays such as Easter.

Not every zoo animal gets a holiday gift box — some, like the bears and badger, are already hibernating; others, like the zebras and duikers could end up stepping on the boxes and getting their hooves stuck. 

But at the small-mammals building, many of the denizens will get a wrapped holiday box filled with awesome gifts: the armadillos will get crickets and wax worms, Gikuyu the Springhaas will get thawed frozen corn, and the adorable Fennec foxes Bonnye and Clyde and Bush Babies J.J. and Kirby will open their boxes to find mealworms,  zookeeper Stephanie Harpt said.

Harpt placed bits of banana in the gift boxes for the ruffed lemur and the golden lion tamarins. With the animals in another part of their exhibits, Harpt opened doors and placed the tamarins' box in a mesh cage and the lemur's box on the floor.

"The lemurs don't work too hard for their treats. The golden lion tamarins, though, we can even give them a puzzle feeder" requiring them to figure out how to open doors, Haupt said.

True to form, the golden lion tamarins — mom Levi, dad Basil and three children — made a beeline for their gift box, gathering around it to pull out banana bits and then tipping the box over and playing with it. 

Meanwhile, Morombe, the ruffed lemur, sauntered over to her gift, licked off the banana on top of the wrapping and then shoved her cinnamon-colored furry head fully into the box to chomp on more treats.