For our anniversary this year (seven years – wow!), we decided to treat ourselves to a little adventure. At some point in the last few months I stumbled across a website for this place in Santa Rosa called Safari West, which is a huge privately owned wildlife park full of all sorts of African critters. Originally we were just going to stay overnight and maybe take a safari tour, but when I went poking around the website I found out that we could sign up to be Keepers for a Day. And that sounded like a whole lot more fun than just trundling around the park in a truck with a bunch of other tourists, so that’s what we signed up for.

I’ve been a little concerned because the air quality in recent weeks has been pretty horrible, what with the nearly 1000 fires burning all over Northern California, spewing smoke into the air and making life hellish for people who might already have problems breathing – like, say, my extremely asthmatic husband. But the air has finally been clearing up and there is barely a haze on the horizon now, which means we’re just about back to our normal levels of gunk in the skies. Yay.

We drove down Friday night and stayed in a rather basic little hotel in Santa Rosa, mainly because neither of us was really in the mood to get up at the crack of dawn in order to drive two hours to get there at 8am sharp. Through the magic of Jeeves, our cute little GPS unit, we tracked down a nearby Starbucks on the way out of Santa Rosa, and despite having to take some detours to get onto the freeway due to construction, managed to get there earlier than we expected. So we hung out in the dining hall for a little bit, and drank some coffee, and watched people stumble in, bleary eyed and rumpled, to get their own coffee, before a young woman showed up and took us off to start our day. And from then until about 4pm, with a short break in the middle for lunch, we were busy working, hefting heavy things, feeding lots of critters, getting completely dusty, and having a blast.

We started the morning at the feed barn, where the two of us and a chatty, friendly volunteer filled dozens of buckets with various mixes of critter chow. First up was feeding the nyalas.

I should note that this is about the only antelope variety whose name I remember, probably because it was the first variety we met, and also by the end of the day we had seen so many they all started to run together. And also because shortly after that, I got to bottle-feed a baby nyala, who was completely adorable, and not at all patient about waiting for the keeper to mix up his formula, and far too wiggly for Richard to snap a picture. Ah well.

It was fun in the big barn because that’s where some of the giraffes hang out, and as we walked by, lugging giant buckets of critter kibble, giraffe heads came at us from over the partitions and loomed way, way down to try to sniff the tops of our heads. There was a little bit of hiking around, dumping food in some of the other enclosures, including one where we couldn’t actually go in, because there was a baby some-kind-of-antelope in the food hut so we had to wait til it left before we could enter. But eventually we all wedged ourselves into the feed truck – the chatty volunteer very nicely volunteering to sit in the bed atop the buckets of chow – and we set off to feed the rest of the gazillion varieties of antelope and other critters of ungulant nature around the park.

It was quite a lot of fun. For one thing, the keeper was quite willing to answer any and all questions about the various critters we were passing, and we probably got a far better tour than we would have received sitting in one of the safari caravans everyone else had to take. We learned which critters were very friendly (giraffes), and which should be watched carefully at all times – cape buffalo, which she referred to as ‘the mafia of Africa’, zebras, and ostriches. We got to feed a giraffe, although ‘got to’ is a relative term, since the giraffe in question would have been perfectly happy to help himself out of the food bins as we were refilling them, but he was also just as happy to lick the food out of Richard’s hand.

Considering how much I cannot stand slobber and slime, it’s good that Richard was the one getting licked and not me. He kept muttering things for the rest of the trip about giraffe drool, and how no wonder they have such long tongues from the amount of spit they produce. Shudder.

The park has two different types of giraffes, and two different types of zebras. Here we are, standing in front of a cluster of one type of zebra, who were willing to be social only because we had just finished dumping about 10 buckets of food in their various feeding troughs, and therefore could possibly be tolerated for a brief moment.

After we’d driven all over the park, over a lot of very bumpy roads, and managed to empty out all the feed buckets, it was time for lunch, so the keeper dropped us back off at the dining hall. Meals at Safari West are all done buffet style, and everyone sits around big, long tables and eats together. They’ve got a bunch of tables set up outside the dining hall, and that’s where most of the people were sitting. However, we took our food inside, mainly to escape the bugs, but also because we figured what with all the hoisting of heavy bags and buckets, and the accompanying coating of dust, the rest of the guests might appreciate not having to smell us.

After lunch, we met up with a second keeper, this time to focus primarily on the non-ungulants and birds. I can now say that I have gotten to feed a bunch of carnivorous African birds by flinging an entire bowl of raw ground meat, and recently thawed dead mice, one at a time, around a giant aviary. It was made even more amusing by the fact that there was this one bird that was rather incensed that we were all there, and spent the whole time irritably pecking at our ankles. Luckily he did not have a sharp beak, so it was more amusing than annoying, but the keeper pointed out that this particular bird does this every time. And the best part of it is that it always works, because eventually, the pesky humans leave (the fact that their leaving has nothing to do with his pecking is irrelevant) so there’s really no way to train him out of it.

We fed a bunch of different types of birds after the mouse-flinging was done. There was a large vulture, who was rather sulky because earlier in the day he’d been taken out for a demonstration and was still quite put out by the whole experience. He lived in an enclosure with three extremely large tortoises. There was a whole flock of flamingos. There were several large white parrots who I made sure to stay clear of, because in my experience, birds usually do not like me, and I have been bitten enough times by parrots to learn to keep my distance. There were also a whole lot of whatever these guys are, running around the park, and making a whole lot of racket.

We got to pet an extremely friendly porcupine named Prickers, who really, really likes getting her ears rubbed.

We also got to go feed some lovely swans, and a lake full of catfish, some of whom looked as if they could possibly eat a small child, they were that big.

But my very favorite part of the whole keeper-for-the-day thing was when we got to feed the lemurs, because lemurs are some of my very favorite critters, and they had a whole bunch of lemurs. All the ringtails live on an island, all together, and by the end of the afternoon they were finally all coming out to say hello. The fact that we came bearing food definitely helped.

We couldn’t go into the cages, of course, or even touch the lemurs, but we did get to offer two of the black and white lemurs slices of bananas.

That is Richard’s hand, feeding the lemur.

After we were all done, we checked into our cabin, and took very long, much needed showers and also a quick nap because it was a very long day. Here is our cabin.

And here is the interior.

Dinner was another family-style meal, with lots of wonderful food. We ended up sitting next to the couple who had the tent next to ours, and had a nice chat with them.

After dinner, we did a little more wandering around, to go see the ringtail lemurs again, and check out this little pair of black-necked swans and their babies. Sorry for blurry picture – didn’t want to use flash and scare them.

There are three babies in that picture. Can you find them all? (hint – check dad’s back).

Spending the night at the park was definitely an experience, because there was all kinds of critter noise, all night. Our tent had a fabulous view and we left the windows opened (luckily there were lots of blankets because it gets *cold* there at night) so I lay in bed and tried to identify the various sounds. Lemurs were easy to recognize because we’ve heard them often enough at the San Francisco zoo, but some of the others were hard to match up to either bird or mammal. I didn’t get a lot of sleep, obviously, but it was warm and the bed was amazingly comfortable, and so I didn’t mind.

There was a long drive home this morning, where we were greeted by six cats who were quite anxious to let us know how much they disapproved of having been left alone for Two! Whole! Nights! But we made up for it by giving them our dusty shoes to sniff and flop on, so they have decided to forgive us. So now we are home, where the only critter sounds are the occasional howl from Sebastian, or the chattering of the squirrels outside, and while tomorrow is officially our anniversary, I think we picked a spectacular way to celebrate being together for seven years.