london-zoo-staf-1301671

Staff at London Zoo count animals for annual stock take

Transcript

00:00Today is the annual stock take here at a very cold London Zoo, measuring at minus two so far this morning.

00:07Obviously we know how many animals we've got at the Zoo, we count them every single day,

00:11but we formalise it once a year. It's a great fun process, but it's also a really important

00:17time for us to pause and take a bit of thought about the importance of counting. Easy to count

00:23animals in the Zoo, less so counting their world cousins where so many numbers are threatened,

00:29so many habitats are threatened. So a fun day, but also a day for us to take quite seriously

00:35when we think about the wider scale issues when it comes to counting animals. We need to do a

00:40stock take to formalise the process and actually log everything onto an international database

00:45called ZIMS that we then share with other conservation zoos and that helps us plan and

00:50helps other zoos plan how we're going to manage our critically endangered breeding programmes.

00:55Part of the formal stock take is ensuring that as part of our Zoo license we can inform our

01:01local authority Westminster Council of the exact number of animals that we've got in the Zoo.

01:06We've had some really exciting additions, we've had some fluffy additions like two lovely western

01:11lowland gorillas, critically endangered, Venus and Juno, had three lion cubs, Asiatic lions,

01:17just a few hundred of those left in the wild, 53 Darwin's frogs, five Humboldt penguins came in

01:24from other zoos to join our 65 Humboldt penguins here at Penguin Beach at London Zoo. Probably the

01:30trickiest animals to count are the leafcutter ants, but there's a bit of a cheat, we're actually able

01:35to count them as one colony so it's actually quite easy, they don't all line up for us,

01:39and then you can compare to Brian and Lola, our lovely African grey parrots, just two of them,

01:44pretty easy, so polarised when it comes to easy versus difficult, but certainly the ants will rank

01:50cutlery as one of the hardest.