Keeper's Tale
A collected from the animal keepers at Hollywild Animal Park. The keepers interact with the animals daily and offer insight into the behind-the-scenes and personal nature of the animals at the park
Jennifer Carinza has a hard time picking out her favorite among the 19 big cats, 5 bears, and wolf she cares for every day at Hollywild Animal Park. When pressed though, she smiles, and looks toward Nicolai, a European Brown Bear.
Nicolai has his own habitat near that of the Syrian Brown Bears, a subspecies of the European Browns. Jennifer spends a great deal of time with him every day much like a small child demands time with its mother. When she’s working with other animals nearby, he’ll call to her and make noises to try to attract her attention. He wants her all to himself.
“I can’t teach him to speak my language, but I can learn his. All the animals have their own language.”
So she listens, just as any caregiver would.
Is he as cuddly as he looks? Even Jennifer won’t ever know.
Though he follows her around like a puppy and comes to her when she calls him, she knows better than to actually get into his habitat with him.
“We have a series of gates we use with large carnivores whether we’re moving them to feed them or to care for them in other ways,” she explained. “They’re just so strong, they could hurt a person very easily. We know not to take that risk,” she said.
“These characters (bears) can run, climb, swim, burrow and muscle their way through just about anything. They are incredibly strong and very, very smart,” says Jeanne Peters, head of animal staff at Hollywild.
Even though this is Jennifer’s first season with Hollywild, she came to the Park knowing how to stay safe with the big guys. She worked at a zoo in Panama City Florida for six years, caring for carnivores there.
Nicolai weighs nearly 700 lbs. Though seven years old, and nearing full adulthood for a bear, he shows Jennifer his childlike traits.
Could it be because she brings him buckets of tasty fruit, some meats, and omnivore biscuits every day? Or that she keeps water in his habitat and sprays him down with a hose for fun and cooling off?
Part of Jennifer’s work with Nicolai involves keeping his mind active with what animal keepers call enrichments. Roaming the wild, bears would find new things to investigate naturally, but in captivity, it’s up to the keepers to make the animal habitats stimulating.
“Bears pick up on change very quickly. If you move things around, they’ll go try to figure out what you’ve done.”
Sometimes that means that they ‘play’ with a new or moved object, such as a log, until they’ve satisfied their curiosity.
One of Nicolai’s favorite activities is to hunt down new scents.
“The bears really love it when I spray perfume in different places. They search for it, find it, and rub on it, stimulating their senses with the new smell and trying to get it on their own bodies,” she said.
According to his former keeper, Danielle Hoffman, Nicolai’s favorite scent is “Anais Anais.”
Park visitors are surprised to see perfume on the Hollywild wish list, but that’s what it’s used for.
Though bears are crepuscular, meaning they are more active at dawn and dusk, ‘twilight hours’ and thus sleep more during the day and then at night, bears in captivity often adapt to the schedules of their keepers. Since she started working with Nicolai in January, it seems they’re now learning each other’s language.
“He usually stays up and active all morning while I’m working over here. We’re buddies,” she said.
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