At the chicken coop, zookeeper Kate Olsen calls each chicken and rooster by name.

“Little Jerry…Peter Pan…and that one’s Keegan. He’s named after my ex-boyfriend, he loves the chickens,” Olsen says.

Nonchalantly, Olsen saunters up to Keegan and snatches him up, sending the nearby chickens into a flurry of feathers and squawks. I dodge a plump white chicken barreling toward my head. Olsen brings the rooster over to fellow keeper Laura Fournier, who puts Vaseline on his comb to prevent frostbite. The temperature is supposed to drop overnight, and the keepers would rather be safe than sorry.

Olsen is tall and lanky with bright blue eyes. Her two front teeth are just slightly longer than the rest, a small detail that is noticeable because of her unceasing smile. Blonde hair flows out of her ponytail in waves down her back, as if she had spent the day at the beach. Like many of her fellow zookeepers, Olsen has known she wanted to work with animals ever since she was a kid.

“My favorite activities often involved going to zoos, aquariums, nature reserves, and pet stores,” Olsen says. “As I got older I had a small menagerie of pets from domestic pigeons to hedgehogs. My family members started to call me ‘Dr. Doolittle’.”

After distributing a mixture of grapes, sweet potatoes and gravel to the flock, which is slowly calming down, Olsen heads to her next assignment: hand feeding the Bald and Golden Eagles. All of the eagles are unable to fly due to various injuries out in the wild. Some fell out of the nest as fledglings. Others sustained head injuries from colliding with cars, and broken wings from crashing into overhead telephone wires.

There is no mesh covering over the exhibit, allowing wild birds to enter the habitat. Over the years, black vultures have become familiar with the feeding schedule of the eagles. What began with a few visitors has now grown into the largest known flock of black vultures in the wild. This morning, the open-air exhibit quickly fills with wild black vultures looking for a free meal. So the keepers have to hand-feed each eagle, shooing away the vultures until each eagle has had its share.

One of the bald eagles waddles over to Olsen as she enters the exhibit. Olsen grabs a dead baby chicken - the meal of choice for the eagles - from bowl and reaches out her hand. The eagle uses the tip of his beak to pull the chick from her hand before shuffling away.

“They really see this place as home,” Olsen says, tossing a chick to a nearby golden eagle. “The eagles will occasionally glide out of the exhibit on a gust of air. We call the proper codes in for a loose animal, but just end up opening the side gate. They walk right back in on their own.”

More times than not, the radio codes are actually about people, not the animals.

“When we first had our giraffe, I found bags of trash in their holding every morning during checks. Apparently sometime during the night a very generous person thought it would be nice to throw their trash bags over the fence into the giraffe holding,” Olsen says. “Luckily the giraffe never got sick, but it was pretty hilarious to listen to me list off every piece of trash I found in that exhibit over the radio for our records. Some of my radios calls included ‘The giraffe may or may not have eaten: A 50 piece chicken nuggets meal, a grape game blunt, a roll of toilet paper, a bag a chips, hand lotion, a hair weave oil product, and a large tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’.”

Olsen says she loves the job through the good times, bad times, and crazy moments in between, though some of the non-zookeepers in her life do not always understand it.

“I went to Del Val for Wildlife Conservation and Management studies,” Olsen says. “It made the most sense to become a zookeeper. My mom would tell people that I was majoring in veterinary studies, though I was not. She is one for titles, prestige. I don’t know why, being a zookeeper is awesome!”