Some Calgary zoo animals feeling at home with the arctic conditions

It’s -34 C, the perfect temperature to dip and dive — if you’re a penguin! But what about the other more than 4,000 animals at the Wilder Institute/Calgary Zoo?

The zoo says every species has temperature parameters and they are looking at them constantly.

Some animals are feeling just at home in the cold — like the polar bears, used to arctic temperatures — who have the freedom to go inside or outside in a two-acre habitat space, but choose to be outside playing with the ice.

“Because a lot of our animals are cold-tolerant species all the way from all of Wild Canada and in Gateway to Asia we have a lot of cold tolerant animals like our Amur tigers, the snow leopards,” explained Jax Hoggard, Wild Canada Animal Care Supervisor at the Wilder Institute/Calgary Zoo. “They all live in very similar climate to what we have in Canada.”

While many are used to cold snaps, zookeepers try to create environments to help other animals to adjust to the changing temperatures.

Something they watch closely is that they are adequately fed according to their specific needs — increasing some diets when necessary.

“There’s not a lot of enrichment that might happen for animals that just wanna hunker down in a bed and not move around, so again yes we might give them an extra flake of hay or for the polar bears we actually did a satiation for them because at this time of the year they can get quite hungry and they actually need a full satiation so we actually doubled their diet for a couple of days,” Hoggard said.

“As long as animals are fed and warm we just make sure that we are fully prepared for the weather outside,” she added.

Rainforest species or savanna species will stay locked into their suitable habitats until the cold snap is over.