Zoo news – September 2025

September was another busy month for the zoo. With the parks opening hours changing to just being open at weekends the zoo has the opportunity to get some essential maintenance works and updates carried out.  Read below to find out about all the activity that took place this month.

A Very Special Guest – Behaviour Expert and Animal Trainer, Barbra Heidenrich visits the Animal Care team.

Animal training, in a zoo environment, is an essential task that contributes to the best practices of husbandry care. Specific training helps lower stress and improves the welfare of our animals through increase healthcare measures as well as cognitive stimulation of individuals.

Emerald Park zoo residents are trained to stand on weighing scales, present limbs and teeth for inspection as well as stand for vaccinations all without sedation. This ensures our animals stay happy and healthy which is the number one priority here at the Zoo.

In September we welcomed Behaviour expert and Animal trainer, Barbara Heidenrich, to the Zoo. Barbra worked closely with our zookeepers to assist in training programmes and answer any of the teams’ questions.

Senior Keeper and training co-ordinator Rob Seaman, Animal Behaviour & Training Council -Animal Training Instructor, writes about Barbra’s visit.

This month, our animal training consultant Barbara Hedenreich came to visit us. Barbara was here for three days and throughout her visit, she observed our training sessions with a variety of our species here in the park from our Amur Leopards to Squirrell Monkeys, Corsac Foxes, Southern Ground Hornbill, King Vultures and Bush Dogs.

Barbaras visits are always insightful as she offers valuable feedback and guidance to help us refine our training for each individual species. Their insights give us new ideas to improve animal welfare and encourage cooperation in husbandry and veterinary care. We were lucky this time to have a chance to sit down with Barabara to partake in her new interactive workshop

“Reinforcers Revealed: What Animals Want and How We Can Tell” 

This workshop was run the following week at the EAZA (European Association of Zoos and Aquariums) Annual Conference 2025 in Łódź, Poland. The workshop helped us all learn how to figure out what animals are working to get or avoid by observing their behaviour.

We always appreciate when Barbara comes to visit us in the zoo as her knowledge is inspiring and informative, and we look forward to putting these recommendations into practice as we continue to strengthen our training program.

Secondary School Packages – With students returning to school in September we welcomed lots of classes in to carry out educational packages to start off the academic year.

The Discovery and Learning Department were busy with Secondary schools as we saw the return of our Education Packages. Our most popular sessions with secondary schools being the Ecology and Business & Sustainability packages for Junior Cycle, Senior Cycle, LCVP and travel and tourism students from all around the country.

If you are a teacher interested in booking one of these packages for your school, don’t hesitate to send us a message through our education tab on the website!

Biodiversity in Autumn – As the season begins to change, we see a different in the biodiversity throughout the park.

As the summer bloom is coming to an end, our native pollinators are still active. Our Discovery and Learning Department are still carrying out our pollinator monitoring with weekly checks for butterflies. This data is submitted to the National Biodiversity Data Centre as part of a nationwide survey. This data is incredibly valuable to researcher’s monitoring populations across Ireland.

You can also get involved in Citizen Science Projects like the Pollinator Plan by clicking here

Its not only our pollinators that are active, but we’ve also seen lots of frogs in our Ecology field. Autumn for amphibians like frogs is spent feeding up in time for winter where they will lie dormant in places such as log piles and compost heaps.

Thanks for reading. Check back next month for more zoo updates!

The Emerald Park Zoo Team