We have a fantastic team of people who care every day for the animals in our facility and it is really my pleasure to lift up Tracy and let her tell you a little bit more about herself as well as the elephants in our care.

Well thank you everybody.

I'm going to start out by saying that I always feel it's a little indulgent that I get to talk about the zoo and I get to talk about my passion.

So I too want to talk about how it started for me and so I too got to pull out some old photos of where it all began.

For those of us who are in animal care, many of us can't ever remember a time when we didn't feel connected to animals, when we weren't inspired by them.

So I have loads of these photos of myself as a very young girl kind of growing up.

I know I was introduced, my last name is Dolphin.

the

Well, when you see this smoke coming in and the air quality alerts shifting into unhealthy or even hazardous, what kind of planning, what kind of action goes into effect for your team at the zoo?

Yeah, so we already have some plans in place, getting ready for, you know, the air quality and the conditions that we're going to be experiencing.

And really, we don't have a one size fits all for all of our animals.

I mean, we take care of small reptiles to our largest elephants.

So it really depends on the species and their habitat of what that plan is going to look like.

So Some of the things we really think about is do our animals have any pre-existing conditions? You know, any cardiac, any respiratory? Are they more sensitive? Those animals are going to be definitely moved inside.

Our great apes, primates, our flamingos, we're all brought inside.

What kind of things are you doing for the humans at the zoo?