Author: Constanze Mager (Burgers’ Zoo, Arnhem, The Netherlands)
Even though the whole world seems to be skyping – and the campaign team certainly does quite regularly skype with each other – a face to face meeting every once in a while is really useful, too. Unfortunately, travelling across Europe to see each other is rather time-consuming, costly and not too great for our CO2 footprint. All arguments for ourselves and for our directors to keep the number of factual meetings low.
But, when a few of us come together anyway for another meeting, we surely take our chance to stick our heads together and discuss.
Lately, such an opportunity arose during the ‘German speaking zooeducators conference’ (in short VZP, which is of course an abbreviation that absolutely makes no sense in English!), in the Northwestern city of Nordhorn. Almost a hundred zooeducators gathered at Nordhorn zoo for a three days meeting. Amongst them, three educators active in the specialist group for the Silent Forest Campaign.
Lucia from Cologne zoo gave a talk on the campaign during the conference. After the official part with presentations and workshops, we quickly met to chat by. Nicolina from Karlsruhe Zoo created bird masks, drawings and material to be used in schools. Also, she has written down an interview with a conservationist busy at the bird rescue and breeding centre Cikananga on Java. That interview will be placed on the website soon.
We discussed the reaction of our education colleagues on the campaign and brainstormed about further steps in creating and translating material as well as evaluating zoo visitors’ knowledge about the campaign’s focus species and goals.
So, even if it rather seems quiet from our group at the moment: be sure that still a lot is going on behind the scenes!