00:00We are at the San Diego Zoo on Center Street in front of our Grizzly Bear Exhibit, and today was an extra special day. We had a donation of snow for the bears.
00:14We received 15 tons of snow, and we were able to share this with not only the grizzly bears, but our Andean bear and our sloth bear.
00:30Snow is a highly enriching item for bears, and especially for the grizzly bears.
00:37This stimulates those natural senses. It ignites a play response. They get super excited. Just have a great old time with it.
00:48Grizzly bears love to dig, and that's one way that they find a huge variety of food sources.
00:54So the digging that we saw today was different for them because normally they have dirt to dig in.
00:58So today they had snow-covered dirt, and that was stimulating that natural behavior of finding what's buried under the snow
01:07when you come out of your winter sleep and you're looking for food.
01:10So it was fun to see the bears investigate in that manner.
01:14Grizzly bears have an amazing sense of smell, and one of the fun parts about the snow is it's covered everything up,
01:21and we had food hidden underneath the snow.
01:23So when the bears came out, we could watch them immediately stick their noses into the snow and start smelling and digging
01:30and finding what smells are underneath the snow.
01:34We've done snow one other time, and they actually repeated the same reaction that they had last time,
01:40which was they come out from the back bedroom area to a winter wonderland,
01:45and they're a bit overwhelmed, their noses are just smelling a mile a minute, investigating what just happened.
01:52And then they wander around, they find the pieces of food, and as they're doing that, they start to get very excited.
01:58And then they start getting a little hop-skip in their step, and then they find each other and play and wrestle,
02:04just have a great old time with it.
02:05It's definitely an all-day enriching event, and if the weather stays a little cooler, hopefully it'll last a few days for them.
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