Just before Christmas, we welcomed Mat Richards to our team on temporary secondment.
Mat has over 20 years of experience working in Zoological collections around the UK as an animal trainer. He specialises in big cats, marine mammals and, his first love, birds of prey! He recently started a YouTube channel called Animal Adventurers, travelling the world in search of wild animals to share with his followers back home via the power of the internet!
Mat has already visited some amazing places and seen some amazing wildlife, but wanted to return to his roots and spend some time recording where it all started, with falconry and training birds.
We are pleased to have Mat join us and in the short time he has been with us he has already developed new training methods for some of our more difficult characters to work with. All the birds we fly during our displays are hand reared, which makes them much easier to work with. However, just like other animals (humans included), they go through a rebellious teenage stage, which can last a few months or years depending on the bird! This makes them very difficult, and sometimes dangerous to work with, and unfortunately training often gets put on hold while the hormones sort themselves out, leading to a loss of trust and respect by both the bird and handlers.
Mat has been working with Rocky, our Turkey Vulture, Ozzie our Laughing Kookaburra and our Ravens Charles and Rey, all of whom have developed some bad habits which makes them unsuitable for displays. Once Mat has worked out what makes each bird tick, he will bring in the rest of our team so that they can build up their confidence working with these birds again, using positive re-enforcement to reward the behaviours we want the birds to display.
While he is with us, Mat will also be helping to create some new content for our social media channels and website, which we can’t wait to share with you all.
If you’d like to find out more about Animal Adventurers, you can subscribe to the YouTube channel.