This could be a kitchen for a school cafeteria or a restaurant, a first impression not undone when the early crew hauls out the carrots and yams and cauliflower, and a wide, glinting bowl filled with tasty-looking fruit salad.
What changes the scene are the labels on the bins: Baboon. Spider monkey. Elephant. Wallaby. Bear.
Then there are the mealworms, the boxes of live crickets and the tray of raw meat garnished with frozen rat and ... is that a frozen chick?
Yes, it is and it is marked for delivery to a bobcat. It and nearly 1,000 other animals are about to be served breakfast from the commissary at the Phoenix Zoo - all before the first visitors arrive.
Melinda Stelling, the zoo's manager of nutrition services, moves from one station to another, checking with diet technicians arranging food containers on the carts. Each meal - they're known as "diets" in zoo lingo - is placed on a shelf where an animal's keeper can find it.
Feeding a zoo full of animals daily is a highly orchestrated routine, yet it is almost never the same. Diets change when an animal falls ill or gains weight or simply refuses to eat. Fruits and vegetables vary with the seasons. The zoo brought in a new cooler to accommodate visiting koalas three years ago. And starting this month, most of the animals will have to adjust to the zoo's summertime hours, when the gates open at 7 a.m., two hours earlier than before.
"Primates are the pickiest eaters and we have some picky cats, too," Stelling says. "We have to adjust the mix when one of them won't eat. We work to make it a balanced diet. It's just year after year after year of trying things over and over."
A little after 7 a.m., the keepers start to arrive, rolling up to the commissary in electric carts. They pause at the door to clean their shoes in a basin of disinfectant, then scan the shelves and find the right bins or trays. The keepers get in and out quickly. The zoo opens to members in an hour.
Within a few minutes, the keepers empty the shelves on the wheeled carts. Outside, feeding time begins.
Tailored diets
Inside the rhinoceros barn, Half-Ear, a 42-year-old white rhino, digs into a mixture of hay and food pellets infused with vitamin supplements. As an older rhino, Half-Ear has a hard time keeping the weight on sometimes, says Paige McNickle, one of the keepers who works with the lumbering animal.
In a night house up the Africa Trail, Heather Vetter sets out pans of ground meat for the zoo's two Sumatran tigers. She holds back some of the meat and a few trout for later. Hadiah, the 6-year-old female tiger, will retrieve the food in the outdoor exhibit, a way of stimulating her senses. Jai, the 9-year-old male, will remain inside on this day.
At the base of one of the buttes on the zoo's edge, the herd of bighorn sheep crowd around hay tossed onto concrete platforms. In a typical month, the zoo's herbivores - the sheep, giraffes, elephants, zebras - munch through more than 22,000 pounds of hay.
The elephants eat as much as 150 pounds of food a day each, a mix of carrots, apples, melons, grain and hay. Like many of the animals, the elephants eat some of their diets in a barn, where they spend nights. Feeding animals in a barn or a night house removes potential for conflict and allows keepers to do health exams or administer medications.
In one of the tropical-bird enclosures, Bryan Mac Aulay, a senior bird keeper, holds up small trays of a sort of fruit salad for a pair of rhinoceros hornbills. The two birds sit on tree branches near the top of the enclosure. The male grabs a grape in his beak, the morning sun catching the orange-colored horn that gives the birds their unusual name.
"Grapes are a favorite," Mac Aulay says. "They also like steamed yams and bananas during breeding season."
Every animal gets fed
If feeding time so far seems civilized, with individual portions and isolated stalls and special diets, the pelicans happily inject a little chaos.
"There's only one way to feed the pelicans and this is it," says John Sills, manager of birds, as keepers prepare to deliver their fish breakfast.
The six American white pelicans, refugees from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, gather each morning on the far side of the zoo's wetland exhibit and wait for a keeper to start throwing fish. A great blue heron and a giant egret try to blend in, hoping to swipe a few morsels for themselves.
Peggy Trantham rings a bell and then starts to toss fish toward the pelicans. Stephanie Sanchez stands nearby, the designated recorder.
As a pelican snags the fish, Trantham calls out the color of the leg band each bird wears and Sanchez keeps the count. Some of the fish are doctored with nutritional supplements, another detail Sanchez records. The system, though it looks chaotic, is calculated to ensure that not just the fittest survive.
The pelican fish bucket is one of more than 600 meals, or diets, the zoo's commissary prepares each day. A staff of four to six people weighs, slices, mixes and divvies up food for species whose paths would never cross except at the zoo.
Feeding nearly 1,000 animals requires tons of food, $500,000 worth every year. In a month, the zoo doles out 1,100 pounds of rainbow trout for the pelicans, along with 2,200 pounds of bones and 2,700 pounds of raw meat for the carnivores, 6,480 monkey chow biscuits for baboons and mandrills, 1,200 heads of romaine lettuce, 2,500 pounds of carrots, 8,700 frozen mice and 70,000 live crickets for various reptiles.
When Debbie Evers started working in the commissary 30 years ago, it was a one-person operation and the job was a stop along the way to becoming an animal keeper.
"I worked alone, 10 hours a day," Evers says. "On Wednesdays, we made our own bird-of-prey meat. The birds got pans of fruit cut in half. We grew our own grass for the rhinos. We got donated bags of cat and dog food. We were a young zoo then."
Today, the zoo develops diets with the help of nutritional consultants. Food is weighed and prepared so that the animals receive 2 to 4 percent of their body weight daily. Food preparers work from loose-leaf binders full of recipes and diet instructions.
At the carnivore table, Denise Metcalf measures out ground meat for the big cats and adds frozen rats or birds to some trays. Mary Yost mixes grapes, blueberries, papaya, apples and other fruits for some of the birds. Evers chops yams, cucumbers, carrots and zucchini for other herbivores. Bins of nutritional biscuits sit nearby, to be added to the final meal.
"It's just like being at home in the kitchen," Evers says. "You have to follow a recipe."
Keeping instincts sharp
Sometime after 8 a.m., the baboons lope out of their night house and into the exhibit area. The five females emerge first, sniffing at romaine, kale, cucumbers, green beans and chickpeas stashed around the enclosure. Then Moja, the 12-year-old male, bounds through the door and barks at the others as he starts searching for food.
Bob Keesecker works with amother primate, the Bornean orangutans. Like the baboons, the orangutans are fed in the night house, then let out into their exhibit area, where Keesecker has hidden kale and romaine, sometimes smeared with molasses or honey.
"Nobody eats kale," Keesecker says as he places greens around the enclosure. He stuffs some high up on a fence and more on the perch of a concrete climbing structure. "I want them to have a little exercise in the morning, so I make them climb."
Feeding routines are often devised as a way to keep animals alert and active. Living in captivity means they never go hungry, but if they never search for food, they can become bored or lazy - and less interesting for visitors.
Food for the next day
As the day nears an end, some of the animals are fed for a second time. The lions and tigers get more meat, and many of the birds get fresh trays of fruit. In the commissary, the staff is finishing prep work for the next day's diets. As each bin is filled, it goes into the cooler or another storage area.
Stelling, the commissary manager, goes over diet-change requests. Each day, the keepers report any changes in eating habits or any health issues. Stelling, the veterinary staff and other managers consult and sometimes decide to alter a diet, adding or subtracting food, changing the mix.
Devising the right diet is a collaborative effort, Stelling says. The zoo looks at what the animals ate in the wild, what they might have eaten at another zoo and consider special needs. A pair of koalas on loan from the San Diego Zoo in 2010 required Phoenix managers to arrange for a twice-a-week delivery of eucalyptus leaves, which were stored in a special cooler. The commissary also has to account for special zoo events where the public is allowed to feed animals.
During the day, the commissary receives deliveries to keep the food stores stocked, from a load of hay (500 bales every other month) to a shipment of live crickets or live mice for the black-footed ferrets to the big bones used as weekly treats for lions, tigers and other carnivores.
"We have to find a balance between ensuring the right diet and getting something they'll eat willingly," Stelling says. "Usually, that's something sugary, which we don't want them to eat."
A little before 6:30 p.m., the commissary crew stows the last of the next day's meals in the walk-in cooler. The kitchen is as clean as as any restaurant's would be at closing time, the smell of food erased by disinfectants.
Outside, many of the animals are already in their night houses. Breakfast is only 12 hours away.
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