We’re inviting you to a grand celebration of our planet and its amazing and diverse environments. In front of the Amani Oasis aviary, we’ll have special explorations of the three prime elements of earth, air, and water. You’ll be able to get up close and personal with conservation concepts unique to these elements and take part in hands-on experiments exploring those worlds.

Alongside these displays, our dedicated Junior Keepers will be presenting a recycled jungle and we’ll have some partner organizations hanging out with us as well; the California State Parks, Sonoma Land Trust, Petaluma Wildlife Museum, and Sonoma Snow Leopard Conservancy to name a few!

As with all our special events, your reservation grants you full access to our lower grounds where cheetahs, lemurs, monkeys, and flamingos frolic and play. And if that’s not enough, we’ll also have our famous Nairobi minibus out running safari treks. These treks are forty-five minutes loops through our gazelle pasture, out to the rhino paddocks and to the lands of Watusi beyond!

For the most dedicated, we encourage you to enjoy a morning with us at our Earth Day Extravaganza and then head to downtown Santa Rosa to take part in another amazing Earth Day event: the Global March for Science. Visit www.marchforscience.com for details on the march.

This year, make Earth Day something special with us at Safari West.

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Loren, with his encyclopedic knowledge of local flora and fauna and exuberance for wildlife, will enter our African Hoofstock Internship while Zach will kick off our brand new Information Technology Internship. As technology advances, the nation’s zoos, wildlife parks, and conservation organizations need not only dedicated scientists, keepers, and educators but gifted IT specialists as well.

We also celebrated the graduation of Lidia Tapia from the Safari West Wildlife Preserve Avian Internship on that same date. We’re especially excited and proud of Lidia who is our very first graduate to complete the entire program, from Junior Keeper through an internship. Having completed a behavioral study of our flock of white-cheeked turacos, Lidia is now fully prepared to pursue a career in the industry or continue her studies at a collegiate level!

Please join us in congratulating these hard-working Junior Keepers and interns as they prepare to take the next step in the ongoing work of conservation and wildlife science. Congratulations Lidia, Zach, and Loren!

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We’ve got everything you could want in a Halloween celebration. There’s the Conservation Pumpkin patch where you can sponsor a pumpkin for our wild creatures. There’s something awesome about watching a rhinoceros smash a jack-o-lantern, or seeing the lemurs sneak up on a snack-filled gourd. With a small donation, you can make that happen and help support the work of the Vulture Conservation Foundation! You may not think of buzzards as birds that need some help, but they most certainly do and you could be a part of that.

We’ve also got the Safari West Trick-or-Treat Trail which passes through our Junior Keepers’ Mad Science Lab, past the Wall of Skulls, and through the Bone Garden where our Osteology Lab Scientists bring Dia de los Muertos and Safari West together in an amazing way. There are incredible things to see and delicious candy to collect. And when your feet feel a little tired, you’re welcome to kick back and relax on the Trick-or-Trek bus tour, a 45-minute cruise through a few of our habitats. Enjoy the sights of giraffes, rhinos, and antelope galore as you travel through their Safari West home.

But what about the costumes? Of course, you should come in costume! All we ask is that you skip those cheap plastic things you find in the store. They’re made of single-use plastic and are almost guaranteed to wind up in a landfill by Thanksgiving. Instead, show off your creativity. Come up with an awesome costume made with stuff you find around the house, or from recycled old costumes, or from anything else you can think of. Wow us with your imagination and ingenuity and you just may take home a prize!

Lastly, if you want to make a day of it, reserve dinner with us. After an afternoon of exploration and fun, sit down at the Savanna Café for a delicious African-inspired meal followed by a presentation by Corky Quirk of Nor-Cal Bats. Not only will she fascinate you with her stories of our local flying mammals, she’ll introduce you to a few live and in person.

Halloween and Dia de los Muertos are festivals to honor the dead and celebrate the living. Come to celebrate with us at Safari West and make your Halloween wild!

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On Saturday, October 29th, you’re cordially invited to come attend our Halloween Spook-tacular! Like any good Halloween bash, costumes are highly encouraged, but with the catch that we want to see your most conservation-minded creation. What does that mean? Well, we’re not big fans of the cheap, few-use manufactured costumes that fill the shelves of big-box stores this time of year. Convenient though those may be, they tend to wind up in landfills by the first week of November and are almost always made of plastics and other non-biodegradables. Stun us with a clever costume made of recycled materials (clothes, boxes, old costumes, etc) and you may go home with free passes for one of our Classic Safari Tours.

Since you’ll already be in costume, you and yours should also take a turn on our Trick-or-Treat Trail! Visit our Conservation Pumpkin Patch, the Junior Keepers’ Mad Science Lab, the Wall of Skulls, and the Bone Garden, collecting candy all the way. This trail is not only a source of sugary sweetness, it’s also an amazing tour through some skeletal specimens of Safari West animals assembled by our dedicated Osteology Team (scientists of the skeleton). The Conservation Pumpkin Patch is a great place to support pumpkin-enrichment for the animals in our collection while simultaneously supporting the Vulture Conservation Foundation and their important work with some notoriously unnerving birds.

Around these activities, we’ll also be running our Trick-or-Trek bus tours. These mini-tours take place on our Nairobi bus and depart every 45 minutes starting at 10 am. Climb aboard and head out to meet giraffes, rhinos, watusi cattle, and antelope galore!

If all of this hasn’t satisfied your Halloween cravings, top off the day with a dinner reservation at the Savannah Café! Not only will you have a delicious dinner in sight of our haunting herds, you’ll also be able to attend an after dinner presentation by Corky Quirk of NorCal bats. She’ll be talking about our local bats and bringing some of them to meet you face-to-face!

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For this reason, the Safari West keeper department has added the bearded dragons to the Jr. Keeper curriculum. The Jr. Keeper program is a product of the Safari West Wildlife Foundation, a non-profit foundation associated with the Safari West Wildlife Preserve. Kids in the Jr. Keeper program comes to Safari West to experience what it’s like to work with exotic wildlife. They learn general husbandry and how to feed and care for many of the species in our collection. Before the arrival of these two beardies, the Jr. Keepers were dealing mostly with small mammals and birds. Thanks to Reptar and Misha, we can now include reptile care in their curriculum!

Each day that the Jr. Keepers work with the two lizards, they carefully prepare diets, keeping a close eye on maintaining a nutritional balance and appropriate intake. They’re also learning to keep the daily records that professional zookeepers rely on to maintain the health and vitality of their charges. Our Jr. Keepers don’t just learn to care for the creatures though, they are also gaining experience in what we call “interpretation”. Like keepers and guides throughout the world, the Jr. Keepers are discovering the joy that comes from teaching others what you know. Several days a week, visitors to Safari West get to see our young up-and-comers strolling the property with one or both bearded dragons on their shoulders. If you see them on the property, please feel free to approach them. They’re excited to show off their new charges as well as answer any questions you may have.

The Jr. Keeper program is a valuable ongoing project at Safari West. Not only does it add to the experience of guests on property, it is also a critical resource in the development of future advocates for wildlife education. The Jr. Keeper program is open to children ages 12-16. For further details or to submit an application, please visit www.safariwestwildlifefoundation.org or contact Corrine Freitas at (707) 566-3613.

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The four crested porcupines making their homes at Safari West make up the entirety of our rodent collection. Unlike the ground squirrels, gophers, and field mice scurrying through our open spaces, the crested porcupines are huge. Among the largest rodents on the planet, crested porcupines can grow to be the size of a dog and weigh anywhere from 25 to 60 pounds. While their size alone is startling, the feature that makes them famous are those scary, spiny quills.

Rather than the soft fur we’re used to seeing on their rodent cousins, the porcupines are covered with a menacing coat of long, thick, viciously sharp quills. These quills are technically hairs as well, except that they are significantly harder, thicker, and sharper than any hair we’re used to seeing. Quills serve a valuable defensive purpose, protecting the porcupine from potential predators. Generally speaking, it’s unwise to attack a creature covered in a coat of needles.

While porcupine quills cannot be fired from their bodies and aren’t poisonous, that doesn’t detract from their efficacy as a defensive weapon. When threatened, the crested porcupine lives up to its name. The black and white banded quills which up until now have been lying down along its back crest up and out, opening like an umbrella to transform the porcupine from a really big guinea-pig-like creature into a spiky mass of intimidation and threat. In many cases, this sudden increase in apparent size and added scariness of appearance serve to discourage a potential predator, but if they don’t, the porcupine has a few other strategies up its sleeve. First, they will shake and stamp, causing their quills to rattle together, a technique you may recognize from the rattlesnake. It’s an unnerving sound and draws attention to the bristling armory sprouting from the big rodent’s back.

As a last ditch move, the porcupine can scurry sideways or backward, angling the much sturdier and scarier quills on its sides and back toward the predator. They are fast and agile creatures and an unwary leopard or lion runs the risk of a paw or face full of deep, penetrating wounds. Stab wounds to the face are no laughing matter, especially in the wild where the risk of infection is high. Porcupine encounters that go this far can be fatal.

In spite of this intense and ferocious defense, crested porcupines are generally peaceful creatures. Their quills are defensive in nature and the big rodents are primarily herbivores. A day in the life of a porcupine is oft times fairly uneventful. They tend to inhabit burrows (some of which they dig themselves, though they will readily take over another animal burrow given the chance). During the day, they are typically at home and asleep, venturing out at night to forage for bulbs, tubers, fruits, and grains. Although they survive mostly on vegetation, it is not uncommon to see porcupines gnawing on the bones of other animals. This behavior has several motivating factors, one of which is that, just as with rats and beavers, the gnawing wears down and sharpens their endlessly growing incisors, keeping one of their primary tools for survival in pristine order. The chewing of bones also has the added benefit of introducing important minerals into their diet. Calcium is a major component in bones and helps keep them rigid and strong. Porcupines, by ingesting calcium-rich skeletal matter can repurpose that calcium to grow rigid quills as well.

The Junior Keeper program sponsored by the Safari West Wildlife Foundation has deep ties to our four crested porcupines. The prickliest members of our collection do a phenomenal job of demolishing their habitat. Between their burrowing activities, the constant gnawing on branches and bones, and the ongoing shedding and regrowing of quills, they generate a lot of mess. Every weekend, our intrepid Junior Keepers show up to go in with the porcupines and help clean their room. The cresting behavior the porcupines do to startle predators, they also do when excited and a common sight here on the property is of four giant spike balls scampering around a small army of rake bearing Junior Keepers. As part of the housekeeping, the Junior Keepers also collect and sanitize the dropped quills which are then brought to the trading post where they can be purchased by inquisitive guests.

While the housekeeping is important for the health and well-being of the porcupines, the experience is also an educational one for our Junior Keepers. As they interact with the animals, they learn to identify behavioral cues and watch for potential concerns. They develop skills which allow them to monitor changes in the habitat environment which may indicate health issues, territorial disputes, potential pregnancies, and so on. They also spend a great deal of time generating enrichment for the porcupines. Enrichment can consist of puzzles, toys, and other activities created to stimulate mental engagement and problem-solving in our animals. It’s not enough to feed and house them appropriately. Physical health has little value if mental and behavioral health isn’t accounted for as well.

Working with the porcupines and other animals grants our Junior Keepers small-scale experience with the kind of work done by our keeper staff at large. It is our hope that with this introduction the passionate youngsters of the Junior Keeper program will be inspired to continue down this path. The experience they gain here at Safari West coupled with an education in biology, ecology, animal husbandry, or a related field will equip the up and coming generation to join us as professionals. Conservation and wildlife science is dynamic and constantly evolving fields of exploration and we need all the bright, young minds we can get.

Come to Safari West and see some of the weirdest, wildest rodents on the planet and some of our inquisitive and hard working Junior Keepers at the same time, and possibly even in the same habitat!

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