Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me

Summer at the zoo means crowds, heat, sleepy animals... and, perhaps above all else, flies.  Of these seasonal delights, the flies might be my biggest pet peeve.  How serious of a problem they are depends on where you are in the zoo and what animals you work with.  If you're in the reptile house, you might not notice them.  Work with, say, elephants or giraffes, and you might as well keep a fly swatter attached to your belt.  Not that it'll be much use for swatting the flies on your animals.  Well, not politely, anyway

Flies can swarm unattended diets (which is why we tend to remove leftover diets - especially meat and fish ones - as soon as we can) and bother animals.  Most worryingly, though, they can lay their eggs in even the tiniest of open wounds.  And then you get maggots.   In case you were wondering, that's very unpleasant to deal with.  I'll spare you the pictures.

To combat flies, we can use traps, we can take hygienic steps (like removing the uneaten diets and cleaning poop frequently), and we can spray fly spray on the animals.  The success of that option depends on the willingness of the animal to be sprayed.  Very shy, skittish animals won't let you get close enough to apply the spray, so a lot of training and trust-building goes into the process.  Unfortunately, no matter what you do, when you deal with large animals that poop a lot, flies are inevitable, no matter what you do.  In the wild, some animals wallow in mud or swim in water to avoid them, so we provide those opportunities.  In other cases, animals in the wild just have to suffer and deal with it, sometimes seemingly driven mad by the hordes of insects.

The image above was shared by Utah's Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, showing their southern white rhino, Princess.  The contraption on the rhino's face is a series of horse masks, which are meant to protect the animal's face from flies.