Rescue Tails SeaWorld, Orlando - 4K Full Show An Educational Exhibition of Exotic Animals

And now SeaWorld is proud to present Rescue Tales. Hello everybody how you guys doing today? I said how you guys doing today? Now my name is Jojo and this is Jillian and we work for a company called Conservation Ambassadors. We're actually based out of California and what it is we do at our center is we give a hope to either to animals that have been injured somehow and can't be set free back out into the wild. Those animals are sent to us at our center. Or other times, other times we have a big problem especially here in the United States. We have a problem with people trying to make pets out of wild animals. That never ever works. It's also against the law. Those animals are taken away and sent to our center as well. Then what we do is give these animals lots of love, lots of attention, and lots and lots of food. And the animals that we can, we train to travel. Going mostly to school groups. Giving us a chance to share some amazing rescue wildlife up close and personal. Now we've actually been working very closely with SeaWorld over the last 26 years and we've gotten to witness some of the amazing rescue work that SeaWorld's done. In fact since SeaWorld first opened their gates they have rescued and released over 40,000 animals. That definitely deserves a round of applause. That's incredible. They're some of the best at what they do. So when SeaWorld asked us to come share some of our rescue wildlife with you we were super excited to do so and we brought some awesome animals for you guys to meet. And we're going to start with one of our local friends. Hello everyone. Now opossums were originally an east coast animal but they were spread across the United States while the railroad tracks were being built. Believe it or not back then they were actually brought state to state for use as a food source. Now we got a little poppy because one night a lady was driving home and she saw a little furball run across the road. She tried her best to stop but unfortunately she couldn't and she hit that furball. She got out of her car to realize that she had hit an opossum but she was very smart and she had heard somewhere that opossums are marsupials which are mammals with a pouch on their belly where they carry their what? No their lunch. No you guys are right they're babies. So she was very brave and she walked over and checked inside that pouch and inside she found five little baby opossums all still alive. So she scooped one up and took them to the local rehab center where they had the best chance of surviving and returning to the wild. Now those little baby opossums were doing great. They were getting bigger, finding their own food, climbing around, even staying away from people all except for one. They eventually found out that poppy here was almost completely blind so he would not be able to survive with his siblings in the wild so he was sent to us at our center. Now poppy here is about two years old and that may seem young but opossums only lived about three or four in the wild but get this in those three years a mama opossum can have up to 50 babies. Yeah I think if I had 50 kids I'd probably call it three years too. Now opossums do one other really cool thing though. They actually keep us safe just by eating. Opossums love to eat ticks. In fact one opossum can eat up to 5,000 ticks every season and since ticks are one of the biggest carriers of Lyme disease that means that as these guys are in your backyard snacking on the bugs, they're actually keeping you and your pets safe from disease. Let's give a hand to poppy for America's only marsupial. Now speaking of marsupials, this next guest comes from the land of marsupials, Australia and he's what's known as the laughing kookaburra and this little bird here is truly famous for his voice. Today he's this bird's call on behalf of every single movie that's ever had jungle scene ever. It doesn't matter if they're showing an African, a South American, or an Asian jungle, they use this little bird's voice even though he's from the exact opposite climate. He's from the grasslands of Australia but they use his call because it does sound like he comes from the jungle. You guys want to hear it? Are you ready buddy? I love it. Do any of you guys have one of those friends that never stops talking? If you don't, you're probably that friend. Now he may be famous for that amazing voice of his but he should be famous for something else as well because this bird here is an amazing hunter. He's actually the largest member of the kingfisher family but he doesn't hunt fish. No, instead he hunts mice, lizards, and snakes in the grasslands of Australia. I've even seen videos of these little birds hunting snakes as long as six feet. They'll dive down with that specialized bill of theirs. They grab onto the snakes right behind the back of the head then they'll whip them back and forth and back and forth until it's like a limp doodle. Then they'll start to swallow. Slowly swallowing and digesting that snake over three days until it actually hangs out the corner of his mouth. Sounds weird. Works very well for the kookaburra though. Now some of you guys have met a lot of these birds. They found a way to purchase one online and brought one into their home. Only this person lived in an apartment complex and see kookaburra are known in Australia as the outback alarm clock because every single morning at the break of dawn they let out that call. Let's just say the neighbors were in such a big fan of Giggles here which is why you're sent to us in our center. Now I do love this bird a lot but being woken up by that call every single morning would be enough to have me pull my hair out kind of like our next guest but that's Giggles the laughing kookaburra. This is Blizzard our turkey vulture. Now turkey vultures get up in the morning and the first thing they do is they spread out those big wings and start to sunbathe. He will use those wings just like big solar panels and once he's nice and warm he will take to the skies. Once he's up there he'll lock out those wings and start doing big lazy circles in the air. Well they look lazy but he's actually working. He's going like this. He's smelling. He's smelling for the grossest, stinkiest, most disgusting rotten thing that he can find and when he smells something totally gross that's been dead for a while he says lunchtime and dives right on in to make a meal of it. Vultures eat dead stuff. Now most of us hear dead stuff and think ew but if we're honest with ourselves most of us eat dead stuff too. No one's chasing a cow down the road to chew on its leg. The only difference is vultures eat meat that has so much bacteria in it that it would make us very sick. They're basically like nature's cleanup crew plus because they have that bald head or they're always picking their faces into rotting meat they have that bald head to help keep their feathers clean. He's got another way of keeping himself clean but it's kind of weird. Do you guys want to hear it? If he needs to clean off his legs he pees on them. Yeah that's why we named this guy wizard. Now we got wizard here because about 17 years ago someone thought it would be a good idea to shoot this big beautiful bird in his left wing and because birds bones are hollow when they break they often don't feel quite right and that's what happened to wizard here. He can fly a little bit but not enough to survive on his own in the wild. All right let's give a hand to wizard our beautiful bird. Now we're gonna go for beautiful to cute. This is Maya. She's about a 40 year old spider monkey. She's been at our center almost 30 years now and in 1994 we had a call from LA county sheriffs saying they found a monkey in a dumpster. Apparently somebody threw her away and this kind of thing actually happens a lot. See people get monkeys they try and make them into pets and they quickly learn why that's not such a good idea. See monkeys are set up by nature to be the farmers of the rainforest. They are set up to eat fruits, they swallow the seeds, they squeeze the seeds out the other end in a nice little pile of fertilizer and they do this about every 15 minutes. So as they're planting fruit trees in people's couch cushions around the rest of their house people get very tired of them. That's the fact that as monkeys get older they tend to get an attitude. People get sick, get sent to the hospital and if that's not enough they find out that these monkeys can live 40 to 50 years. So they get rid of them in all sorts of ways whether they conquer you as this wildlife and they send them to centers like ours or other times just release them into the world. Kind of like what happened to Maya here. Now spider monkeys they are not set up like a lot of other monkey species. She doesn't have that opposable thumb on her hand. She does have one on her foot but instead. Can I see your hand here girl? Can I see that hand? Thank you. Instead she has four alien-like fingers that allow her to hook onto the branches and she can swing through the trees as fast as a horse can run on land. She also has the coolest tail in the jungle. Her prehensile, her grasping tail is so dexterous that she can pick up something as small as a grain of rice with the tip of her tail and actually use it for all sorts of stuff. She hangs by that tail. She carries food around with it. She scratches her head with it. Every once in a while I'll catch her picking her nose with it. I mean it's the most amazingly useful tail I have ever seen. But when Maya first came into our center she was not doing very well. She was fed so much of the wrong foods when she was young that she has major health issues even to this day. As you guys can probably see when she was hanging from my arm she can't even extend her legs fully which is a big part of why she's not able to live with other spider monkeys and why she's with us at our center. Now spider monkeys they are amazing top tier climbers but our next guest has some surprising climbing abilities as well. But let's give a hand for little Maya the spider monkey. This is Disco our gray fox. Now we got Disco from a local rehab center that took him in but he was found abandoned as a very young baby. They had intended to raise Disco to be re-released but the rehabber that got assigned to him did all the wrong things. She loved him. She cuddled him. She let him play with her dogs and her kids and so when she took him back to that center for release they instantly realized that she had ruined him. He had lost his healthy fear of people and would not survive in the wild. So instead they called us. 12 years ago we took Disco in and he's been helping us do educational programs ever since. Now Disco is a pretty special special little guy. Foxes only live to about eight or nine in the wild and he is 13 so he is a senior citizen. That's why he brought him here to Florida. Now foxes are really incredible creatures. Great foxes can scale trees with ease using their cat like movements and they are exceptional hunters and scavengers eating anything from mice and carrion to berries and grasses but for a while their numbers were drastically decreased due to over hunting for their beautiful fur. Plus we introduced an invasive species. The red fox has taken over great fox's habitats. They've taken over their food sources but luckily in recent years great fox populations have been making a steady comeback which I think is awesome to see. Now little Disco here may look pretty cute but actually he's very stinky. Great foxes have a very strong musky odor. It's what he uses to defend his territory from other males as well as a personal cologne to attract the lady foxes. It's a little weird but it works for him but even though he's kind of stinky we still love him. Now our next animal used to be a challenge animal. We would bring her out for audiences to try and guess and see what she was but in recent years we've been losing this challenge. She's about to come on out but let's give a hand to little Disco our great fox. Now this, this is Samantha and what is she? A lemur. You guys are exactly right but she's not just any lemur. She's what's known as a brown lemur. You guys know why she's called a brown lemur? Yeah because she's brown. Now if you look at the lemur's eyes, would you think she's awake through the day or do you think she's awake at night? That's what I think too with her big yellow owl-like eyes she looks like a nocturnal or a nighttime animal but she's not. She's actually dire. She gets up in the mornings and the first thing that she does is she greets every member of her lemur family and help one lemur says hello to another lemur. Well would you guys like to see? Are you sure you want to see? All right I'm going to make you stand like a pig. She's going to answer me back then she's going to do something rather strange. You guys sure you want to see this? All right things I need for an audience. Ready Samantha? Did you guys see that? First he answered my big like breath and then she licked inside my nose. You guys want to see it again? Now since I had to do it twice, I have an idea. How about everybody turn to the person next to you and say hello. Don't do this. I got in big trouble with a preschool group because I couldn't get them to stop. It's like a new school day. Now the lemurs they get up they greet their whole family unit then they all wait for food. Now for her she doesn't want to use the ground. Where she lives there are fossa jungle cat-like creatures that love to see lemurs. There's also crocodiles by the water's edge. So when she gets around she uses the trees and how she gets from one tree to the next. You guys know what she does? She jumps. They're even called leaping lemurs. You guys want to see her jump? All right amazing amazing jumping ability. Ready Samantha? How's that? Let's show a real jump. Come here girl. Come here. Oh cheating. No cheating. Big jump. Come on. Okay really little jump. The smallest jump ever. I'm negotiating with a lemur. We're close. I'm close enough. There we go. Little baby hop. No do not clap for that. That for her was nothing. That was barely a hop. But Samantha here is over 30 years old. She's a very old lemur. So I don't ask her to do super far jumps anymore. But when she was younger in her prime she could jump from my shoulder. She could land on the table all the way over there. As she jumps through the air she uses this big beautiful long tail of hers to keep her balanced as she would be bounding through the canopies of Madagascar. Now Samantha though, her story is she was found in her man's home in Palmdale, California. Somebody had decided to be okay against a single lemur, an endangered species, and keep her in a cage in their garage. Now does that sound fair to her? No. I love this girl a lot. I know she was roaming the canopies of Madagascar. Pretty how a lemur's nose is. That is where she truly belongs. There are over 105 different species of lemurs. All of them have two things in common. They are only found in Madagascar. Nowhere else in our planet. And every single species of lemur is endangered in the wild. If we don't do something fairly quickly we can actually lose some of these beautiful creatures. I'll tell you what. There's one other funny thing that lemurs do. They actually keep their fur nice and soft and clean by using their teeth. These are forefront teeth on their bottom jaw like a dental comb or a tooth comb. They break that comb through their fur keeping their fur in perfect perfect shape. That way they can spend as little time on the ground as possible. And with that little Samantha, let's say goodbye to the brown lemur here. This is Tito, our Harris hawk. Now Harris hawks are incredibly unique. They are one of the rare birds of prey that actually hunt in pairs. Because they come from such a harsh desert environment where food is very scarce, they found that by teaming up they have a much higher success rate. Now we got Tito from a facility called the Colson Project that actually breeds and re-releases Harris hawks back in the areas of eastern Texas that have been devastated by hurricanes. Normally they pair the birds up so they have a good chance at survival. But Miss Tito here was deemed non-releasable because, and I quote, she doesn't play well with others. Because she was a bit of a diva and wanted to stay single, she was sent to our center. Now Harris hawks are really incredible daytime hunters. They have eyesight that's about six times better than ours, meaning that even when they look like a tiny little speck high up in the sky, they can still clearly see a mouse all the way down on the ground. Plus they have these really cool ridges over their eyes that act like the front of a baseball cap to block their eyes from the glare of the sun. Their taloned feet use roughly 500 pounds per square inch of pressure to grab their prey and make it a meal, and they even cooperate with their partners to back prey into difficult situations using the flashing white on their tail to communicate with each other. That's what we like to call a hockey talk. Because they're such excellent cooperative hunters, Harris hawks get the nickname the Wolves of the Sky. That was our Now, because we get to work with all these awesome animals, people tend to ask us this sort of question. They always ask us, what's your favorite animal? And you guys know what my favorite animal is? That's none of these guys. We love the wildlife, that's why we do what we do. But my favorite animal without question, without a doubt, is my little wiener dog Basil. I trust him, he trusts me. We never ever bite each other. I know he wants to be with me. You have to know that wild animals much rather be in nature where they truly belong. But animals around our world are suffering. Big things like climate change, deforestation. Take monkeys for instance. 90% of the world's monkey species are endangered. 90% of the world's monkey species are disappearing from this planet. If we don't change some things very quickly, we could lose some of our most beloved animals. I'll tell you what I like on each show, which is a few things. Easy things that we can do locally to help protect our wild breaths. Things like reducing seaweed when we use plastics and recycling. Or picking up garbage and keeping our environments clean. Or if you find a sick or injured animal in the wild, get it to a wildlife rescue center. There are literally thousands of places that can give the animals the proper care they need to hopefully get them back out into the wild. And we thank you so much for coming to listen to our rescue tales and enjoy the rest of your day here at SeaWorld Unplugged. Thank you all for having us.