Balcones Canyonlands Texas Master Naturalist Field Trip San Antonio Zoo Center for Conservation

Story and images contributed by Jennifer Leigh Warner, Experience Wildlife

See this story on Jennifer’s blog

Exploring the San Antonio Zoo Center for Conservation proved to be a very educational experience. On Saturday Oct 2nd a group of Texas Master Naturalists headed to the San Antonio Zoo and was guided by conservation and research manager Bekky Muscher-Hodges to the Center for Conservation and Research.

Exploring the center our group learned about Project Selva, a co-op with San Antonio Zoo’s Department of Conservation and Research and indigenous communities in the upper Amazon Basin of Peru to help provide a continuous revenue stream that does not involve timber harvest or oil extraction. One of these projects involve the art work Gyotaku which involves painting a fish with non-toxic dyes, placing rice paper onto the fish, and extracting a print of the fish, an exact replica, once the art form is perfected.

We then headed into the lab to see the Texas Horned Lizards (Phrynosoma cornutum). The reintroduction project seeks to restore the Texas horned lizard population by working with private landowners to introduce zoo hatched lizards in areas where it has disappeared in recent decades.

Next we headed out to see the Ruffed Footed mud turtles, which are the most endangered turtles in Texas.

Our last stop was to see the Texas blind salamanders (Eurycea rathbuni) and the Mexican blindcat (Prietella phreatophila) which is a rare subterranean catfish known from twelve sites in Coahuila, Mexico. San Antonio Zoo maintains the only captive colony of this species and efforts are underway to establish husbandry protocols and establish a breeding population in captivity.

Thank you to everyone who joined us on this amazing field trip and a special thank you to Bekky Muscher-Hodges to sharing your knowledge and expertise.