Gardner students meet exotic animals
Students at Gardner STEM Magnet School learned about exotic animals from three different continents Friday as the school hosted visitors from Barn Hill Preserve in Louisiana.
Barn Hill Preserve is located in Ethel, La., about half an hour north of Baton Rouge. The preserve currently holds about 70 different animals.
Gabriel Ligon, founder and owner of the preserve, brought five species of “animal ambassadors” with him on Friday, including two kangaroo joeys.
“These are not animals that we see every day because they are not native to Arkansas,” said Angela Stanford, a science teacher at Gardner. “They’re not even native to America.”
Ligon told the students that all baby marsupials are known as joeys. One student walked 25 feet away from him to demonstrate how far a grown kangaroo can jump.
The first animal Ligon taught the students about was an Eclectus Parrot from the Solomon Islands, east of Papua New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean. Ligon wanted to persuade students from ever keeping parrots and other exotic animals as pets.
He discussed the strength of parrots’ beaks. Larger parrots have been known to bite through gold wedding rings.
“We usually discourage exotic pets and we want kids to be educated about these different species of animals,” Ligon said.
“Lots of the kids, we found, have never seen these animals, even in a zoo situation.
“We want them to just be familiar,
know that these animals are out there and maybe incite a passion in them.”
The South American animal ambassador at Gardner was the Patagonian cavy. The cavy is a rodent and a relative to guinea pigs.
Ligon taught students about two animals from Africa and their defensive mechanisms. He showed students the quills of the African pygmy hedgehog.
Students also met a sulcata tortoise, which inhabits the southern edge of the Sahara desert. It is the third- largest species of tortoise in the world.
The sulcata tortoise is also known as the African spurred tortoise because of the spurs that grow on its legs.
Barn Hill Preserve was founded in 2013 to educate and inspire the public about wildlife, exotic animals, and the environment. Representatives of the preserve have visited schools in nine states in the last year.
The preserve presents programs almost every weekday during the school year. Each program introduces five to seven species to children.
Ligon said the preserve would add a sloth to the program in the future. He said they hoped to return to Hot Springs in the future.
Barn Hill Preserve provides a number of opportunities to interact with the animals. The preserve hosts field trips, parties, mobile parties, mini labs, wildlife rehabilitation, training and internships.
Ligon and his staff originally planned to visit Gardner on Monday, but they were delayed until Friday due to weather concerns. They are now headed to Texas to pick up two llamas to add to their program.
Stanford said Gardner was contacted by Barn Hill to find out if the school would be interested in hosting the program. Gardner also provided the preserve with numbers of other schools in the area.
Stanford said it was a good experience for the children to learn about animals that they might not find elsewhere, even in zoos. The information Ligon discussed ties into what the students learn in their science classes.
“A lot of their frameworks involve vertebrates, invertebrates, animals and habitats,” Stanford said. “So it goes along with our curriculum at all age levels in science.”