When you visit CuriOdyssey, you might hear our animal keepers talk about how we provide “enrichment” to our animals. But what exactly is enrichment, you might ask?

Enrichment is what our animal keepers provide to keep our on-exhibit animals and Animal Ambassadors happy, healthy, and stimulated in their environments. Enrichment helps replicate some of the conditions our animals would experience if they were living in the wild. Our animal keepers take this component of their jobs very seriously because it’s one of the most important things they can do to care for the animals!

Enrichment calls for interaction with animal keepers and objects that encourage the animals to behave as they would in the wild – running, playing, and searching for food. Enrichment can also take the form of simply taking our Animal Ambassadors out of their living quarters for a walk (or in the case of our raptors, out into our weathering yard).

To get a better picture of what enrichment might look like, watch our keeper, Megan, doing some enrichment with one of our ferrets, Pyewacket, in the video above!

Want to see enrichment activities first-hand? You can catch our keepers doing enrichment activities during our Animals in Action program. It happens every Tuesday-Saturday at 11am.

Is there anything you still want to know about enrichment? Let us know in the comments section!