PORTLAND, Ore. — Go to the Oregon Zoo's Facebook page and you'll get a behind the scenes glimpse at what's happening there these days.
It could be a lesson about Red Pandas or a video of baby flamingos swimming.
That's because while the zoo is closed to visitors right now, essential staff is working around the clock.
"There's staff here to provide nutrition and medical care and daily husbandry and also life support and heating and cooling, all kinds of support for the animals," said Sheri Horiszny, the zoo's deputy director.
"We have had about 60 people coming the zoo still each day, but we've divided the teams now so that we have a team A and a team B," she explained.
That way if someone on one team tests positive for COVID-19, that entire group will go into quarantine for two weeks while the other team takes over.
Staff members are practicing the same social distancing measures with the animals that they are with themselves.
They are also paying close attention to the primates.
"There's preliminary research that looks like non-human primates may be susceptible," explained Horiszny. "So we are using all our normally protective measures with our primates here at the zoo and we've ramped those up a little bit."
Caretakers are monitoring the animals closely not only for medical reasons but also to see if they actually miss the visitors.
"Do they miss you? I mean yes, probably, some of the animals are definitely engaged by having visitors present," Horiszny said.
In fact, the zoo is taking this unique opportunity to collect some scientific data on how the animals react with visitors versus without.
The zoo has plenty of food and medicine for the animals to last several months, but to insure their long term care, it did have to take some cost cutting measures.
That included laying off about 25 percent of zoo staff at the end of last week.