Sonya Lambkin, as part of her internship project, is hoping to help the birds stop plucking.

“They’ve been doing it for a while and they are really, really ugly. All the time the public, they are like, ‘What is wrong with your ostriches?’ It’s really kind of sad actually,” said Lambkin, 22. “So I’m trying to do a whole different way of feeding them — providing enrichment, which can be lots of different things.”

Organizing the different “enrichments” herself, last Wednesday Lambkin walked around the ostrich exhibit at the zoo, 1301 S. Pennsylvania Ave., in Lansing. She hung buckets filled with cornmeal and ostrich pellets — a special treat for the birds — around the trees at different heights.

She also brought them toys: A string with sheets of thick plastic hanging from it and bottles filled with rocks and food. Anything that might get them interested and keep them from pecking themselves.

Before hanging the toys, Lambkin approached an ostrich who stared at her blankly. She shook the bottles with the rocks and food. The ostrich sniffed around the bottles, trying to figure out exactly what they were.

“Peck at it,” she said, urging the ostrich and hoping her project would work.

It’s clear the zoology senior loves animals — most would assume zookeepers do. Although Lambkin and the other keepers spend most of their eight-hour work days cleaning up poop and feeding animals, the chores aren’t over when she leaves the zoo.

At her house in Lansing, Lambkin can spend another four hours a day cleaning up waste and feeding animals. Right now, she has two dogs, four cats, a bearded dragon and a tank full of fish. And on top of that, she is fostering another dog, two adult female cats and 12 kittens.

For her, animals aren’t just a passion. They’re her entire life.

When work and home combine

It’s hard to walk through a room in Lambkin’s home without running into one animal or another.

The fish tank is in the living room and the kitchen has a more than 6-foot-tall scratch post and play area for the cats. In the spare room resides the bearded dragon and four 6-week-old kittens. Lambkin’s dad and brother helped build large, heated, caged areas to foster kitten litters and their mothers in the basement. Her roommate also keeps a guinea pig in the basement.

“Sometimes it’s a little tiring because I’ll come home from working with animals for eight hours and then I have big dogs, so they get exercised every day for at least an hour or two. And I have my own cats and animals that need to be taken care of on top of that,” Lambkin said.

“It usually ends up being that the house gets really messy and I don’t have time to clean it, or my boyfriend doesn’t get any attention or my friends don’t get any attention. So it is really hard for me to balance it sometimes because I want to help more and more and more but there’s only so much — I keep telling myself — there’s only so much I can do. It does get hard but if I can find the right balance, (and) have enough time for everything, it’s just really, really awesome.”

Lambkin and her boyfriend, Adam Dilley, 23, live in the house along with her roommate and the slew of animals.

On Sept. 23, Lambkin spent the majority of her evening cleaning the foster cats’ and kittens’ cages in the basement.

One litter of kittens is about two weeks old — an age when kittens look more like rodents than kittens and they depend on others for everything, even going to the bathroom.

The other litter of kittens is about 4 weeks old and all are infected with upper respiratory infections. Lambkin gives the kittens amoxicillin herself, which she can get from the Ingham County Animal Control Shelter if they have it. Otherwise, she’s on her own with the costs.

After cleaning one of the cages, which took about 20 minutes, Lambkin cleaned up one of the kitten’s eyes that had crusted over.

“You’re doing good,” she said, holding the kitten like a mother and petting it.

And almost as if in response, the tiny animal meowed.

Although fostering is hard work, Lambkin said it’s always worth it when the animals find good homes. However, sometimes it’s harder than others.

Checking in on the younger litter, Lambkin was devastated to find one of the runts didn’t make it.

“Ugh,” she paused. “This sucks.”

Taking care of the dead kitten who was no bigger than 3 inches long, Lambkin was visibly upset and frustrated.

“This is the really f—-ing s—-ty part about being a foster parent,” she said.

Fostering, which Lambkin has been doing for about two and a half years, can become personal. Another litter of kittens that Lambkin currently has — the litter that is 6 weeks old — she bottle-fed.

“It started out five times a day feeding these kittens,” she said.

“My whole schedule revolves around them and you watch them grow up.”

Though she said Dilley doesn’t like the foster cats and kittens because of the time it takes up, he said he doesn’t mind.

“I’m used to it. Several of the animals are mine. The lizard and the fish tank are mine and one of the dogs and one of the cats. So I’m just as much an animal person — well maybe not as much an animal person as she is — but pretty close,” Dilley said. “It’s part of Sonya. When you take Sony, you take fosters.

“Somebody’s got to do it and she’s awesome at it, so I’m glad she does it.”

Why train lions? Because she can

Though she walked for her graduation in May, the internship at Potter Park is the last requirement Lambkin needs to fulfill her zoo and aquarium concentration. It’s her first time working with exotic animals.

“I like it a lot,” she said. “It’s kind of hard for me to decide between something like that or something like rescue or shelter work — or even like dog training I’m really interested in.”

Along with her ostrich enrichment project, Lambkin is working on another project at the zoo. A couple of times a week, she trains Mashavu, a 2-year-old lioness. She said it’s one of her favorite parts of her job.

When training, Lambkin said she is within a foot of the lion and when the lion does the right thing, she gives her meatballs. At the end of the session, when all the meatballs are gone, Mashavu can get testy, she said, and sometimes leaps at the cage bars or growls.

“A lot of times when she leaps at the cage bars and she’s taller than you and her head is bigger than yours, then it’s really scary,” Lambkin said. “Actually, to teach her to not do that, you have to completely not react at all, which is really hard because inside I’m like ‘Oh my God!’ Ya know? There’s a frickin lion!”

Annie MacFadden, the main trainer for most of the cats at the zoo, oversees Lambkin as she trains.

MacFadden guides Lambkin in her development of Mashavu’s training and also helps by giving advice. For the most part though, Lambkin is making the decisions.

“Sonya is doing very well. She caught on very quickly,” MacFadden said. “She’s got a lot of past experience with animals — not so much in the training realm, but a lot of it has to do with just understanding animals and how they work, how they learn and being able to be aware of reactions.”

Although most of her days are spent cleaning and feeding animals, Lambkin said getting to know the animals is one definite perk of the job.

“There’s so many animals there and you get to see them every day and most of them have names and all of them have their own personalities,” she said.

For instance, she said, the penguins are fed fish but each penguin has a specific way they like to be fed. Some eat their fish head first, others come right up to the keeper and wait and some wait for the keeper to come to them, she said.

“I mean, who gets to go hang out with penguins?” she said. “I don’t know, I just think it’s really fun.”

Lambkin said zoos are often misunderstood by people, and that they have a role outside of public entertainment.

“I hate seeing animals in cages. I hate that they don’t have acres to roam, but zoos provide such a necessary function to be able to connect the wild world and people,” she said.

“Not only are zoos a lot of fun to be able to go see the animals, but they are really, really necessary to have that link for the humans and then for the animals to be able to show that if you want to be able to see these animals, we need to do something. You have to conserve not only the habitats but the whole ecosystem, the species that are in it.”