Animal Diaries Archive

New show format

22 June 2007

Over the last couple of weeks the Bird Show Department and the Entertainment team have been busy looking at the set up of the show and working on making many small changes to improve the performance. After many hours of discussing what was working and what wasn't working we came up with a new format for the two daily shows.

This week we have put the new format into action. Fortunately much of the scripted lines were not changed so it was not too difficult for most of the staff to get used to doing the show in the new format.

One of the big changes we made was the order in which the birds come out to fly. Basically we moved our Macaws from ending our show to starting it, and took the Australian Native Parrots from the start of the show and put them at the end to finish the show with the biggest number of birds in one go. Our flock of Red-collared Lorikeets has also been injected into the middle of the native parrots section to give an exciting burst of speed and colour for the audience to marvel at.

In the photo this week, you can see Rebecca with Queto the Blue and Gold Macaw during one of our training sessions to get the birds used to flying in the new format.

It didn't take that many practice runs for the 20 birds that we use in the show to pick up the new format (which was faster then most of the staff), and for the last 4 days we have been performing the new show for the patrons to the zoo with an excellent response from the crowd.

The other exciting news for the week is that our baby pigeons that hatched a couple of months ago are today going to do their very first show for the crowd by joining in with the flock of pigeons that fly away from one of the entertainers during one of the many comedy skits performed during the entire Wildlife Warriors 101 show.