see-saw for animals project

Been working this week on my intern project, which is to build some sort of enrichment toys for the zoo animals. The idea I came up with was a see-saw made of logs for the bears, porcupines and maybe foxes with holes throughout it to place treats. The idea is that the animals will have fun foraging around the holes for food treats and climb around on the see-saw, and enjoy lots of teetery-tottery hijinks and shennanigans. Last Monday we went into the woods and gathered some logs from trees that had already been cut for trail maintenance. An interesting story there, we found a few logs of various sizes, but none seemed to really be quite the right size to me, we went in with some chainsaws to cut some up and load them up on the gator and had one that was too small, and one that was too large, but didn't find much else. But while we were out a really powerful breeze blew through the forest, making lots of golden leaves tumble down from the lofty treetops, hinting of autumn's arrival. When we drove on our way back with the logs we had we found that right before the end of the trail was a tree that had literally just fallen across the trail, blocking our path, while we were in the woods for that few minutes. And it was the perfect size. We cut it up, both to pass through and to collect this log for the see-saw. And it is the one I used.

I know I'm being a bit obsessive about this, posting five freaking pictures of two logs from every angle, but hey, this is my project, it's good to get some documentation of it. How often does one get to build toys for bears? I hope this project idea can be used and implemented for bears elsewhere, but maybe I speak too soon. We havn't even let Callisto play with it yet! We'll have to wait and see in the next few days...

What I basically did was take two heavy logs, one eight feet five inches in length, one six feet, cut a "saddle" notch into the center of each one on one side, fit these two together, drilled a hole through the middle of both of them and hammered a 1" steel rod to hold the logs together. Actually this hasn't been done yet, as the logs will have to be brought into the bear's enclosure first, then they will be hammered together, otherwise we couldn't get this behemoth through the door. Holes were drilled in various places around the outsides of both logs. These are where treats go. Don't make them too deep! If you do, the animal won't be able to get them out and you probably won't either, the food will rot inside them and it will be worse than the insides of those mcdonald's playground tubes when you were a kid and some other rotten kid squirted a ketchup packet inside there and it went bad and smelled like a garbage dump dutch oven.

...I hope Callisto and the porcupines have fun with these!