00:04We are at the San Diego Zoo on Center Street in front of our grizzly bear exhibit and today was
00:09an extra special day. We had a donation of snow for the bears. We received 15 tons of snow and
00:17we were able to share this with not only the grizzly bears but our Andean bear and our sloth bear.
00:31Snow is a highly enriching item for bears and especially for the grizzly bears. This stimulates
00:38those natural senses, it ignites a play response, they get super excited, just have a great old
00:45time with it. Grizzly bears love to dig and that's one way that they find a huge variety
00:52of food sources. So the digging that we saw today was different for them because normally
00:57they have dirt to dig in, so today they had snow covered dirt and that was stimulating
01:03that natural behavior of finding what's buried under the snow when you come out of your winter
01:08sleep and you're looking for food. So 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
01:19it's covered everything up and we had food hidden underneath the snow so when the bears
01:24came out we could watch them immediately stick their noses into the snow and start smelling
01:29and digging and finding what smells are underneath the snow. We've done snow one other time and
01:37they actually repeated the same reaction that they had last time which was they come out
01:41from the back bedroom area to a winter wonderland and they're a bit overwhelmed, their noses
01:47are just smelling a mile a minute investigating what just happened and then they wander around
01:53they find the pieces of food and as they're doing that they start to get very excited and
01:58then they start getting a little hop skip in their step and then they find each other and
02:02play and wrestle and just have a great old time with it. It's definitely an all day enriching
02:10event and if the weather stays a little cooler hopefully it'll last a few days for them.
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