Wildlife Veterinary Externship in Australia: Taronga Zoo

Taronga Wildlife Hospital (TWH) is the ideal opportunity for students with a travel bug who love working with wildlife. This is a unique facility in that both captive zoo animals and local wildlife are treated here.

The hospital treats all the animals in the zoo’s collection, which are species from all over the world, as well as injured wildlife from the area brought in by the public. The hospital is located on Sydney Harbour in Australia on the grounds of the Taronga Zoo, so animals that reside here have arguably the best view in the city!

Important Details About Applying

The application for the externship in zoo and wildlife medicine consists of a resume, letter of interest, and completed application form. Placements are 4 weeks long, and they fill up almost two years in advance, so apply EARLY!

Externs must provide their own housing and transportation, but the staff at the hospital can provide you with a list of contacts to help you find housing. The staff is wonderful about responding to emails, making the whole process of organizing an externship overseas much less stressful.

I actually found a wonderful family to stay with through a distant connection (former coworker of my best friend’s uncle), so use every connection you’ve got. I used public transportation to get to and from the hospital, and there are quite reasonable rates for month-long passes. I paid $199 AUD for unlimited travel on all trains, buses, and ferries for 28 days, which was good because my daily commute involved all three!

I also had received a travel grant from the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota to help fund this externship, for which I was very grateful because flights from the States to Australia are not cheap.

Daily Activities During the Externship

I had a great experience at Taronga Wildlife Hospital. All of the veterinary staff members are extremely friendly and laid-back, and I felt very welcome there. There are four veterinarians, one veterinary pathologist, six veterinary nurses, and a few other administrative and laboratory staff members.

Daily duties start at 7:30 am, when the veterinarians meet to go over cases currently under veterinary treatment and make a plan for the day. The morning and early afternoon consists of working with the veterinarians on procedures and examinations of patients. Frequent procedures performed included intake physical examinations for new wildlife patients, radiographs, wound care, and intradermal tuberculosis testing.

Depending on the caseload, students also can participate in necropsies with the pathologist. A skills checklist is provided to give an idea of what you should try to complete in your time there. The workday technically ends at 4:00 pm, but I occasionally finished later when some last-minute cases came into the hospital.

I worked with a large variety of species on this externship and was exposed to some very interesting clinical cases. Within my first week alone, my patients included a short-beaked echidna, a baby Francois langur, a blue-tongued skink, a Brazilian tapir, and a black swan.

The Taronga Zoo has plenty of native Australian wildlife, such as koalas and platypuses, in addition to other popular zoo animals, such as tigers and Asian elephants. The veterinarians are wonderful educators and encouraged me to perform procedures myself, and I was allowed to manage clinical cases on my own under their supervision.

If a student’s university has no specific completion requirements for the externship, students must complete a project while at the hospital. Some days were filled with clinical cases until 4 pm, but most days, there was plenty of time in the afternoons to work on personal research.

I felt like this externship had the perfect caseload – in one day, I could work with a green turtle, little penguin, quokka, and Himalayan tahr. My primary interest is in wildlife health, not zoo medicine, but this was a great overview of zoological medicine thrown in to complement a very decent wildlife caseload!

Elliott here again: Thank you Briana for sharing yet another of your unique externship experiences with us! If you missed Briana’s previous articles, head on over to read about her experiences at the White Oak Conservation Center and with the PAWS Wildlife Center.

You’ve probably noticed from these articles that zoo and wildlife externships tend to fill up early. This means that you should really be starting to plan and apply for the experiences during your first and second years of veterinary school. There’s never any harm in sending an exploratory e-mail to check on the status of an organization’s training schedule. They’ll be happy to let you know if and when they have any blocks available.

This is also the type of experience that I always recommend practicing vets look into. I know there are a lot of us who are done with school but who would still be interested in going back for some further training in these uncommon areas, even if they are unpaid. I think most organizations will at least give you a chance to explain why you’re interested, and most will be more than happy to accept your help, just like they do from vet students.

Doesn’t a month in Sydney at the Taronga Wildlife Hospital sound like fun? Any unique ideas on how to pay for that $2000 plane ticket? Read about my own experiences as a vet student working with a wildlife vet in Australia, and learn how I paid for it by attending a conference at the same time.

Do you have an interesting training or educational experience that you would like to share with the community here? Please leave a comment below or get in touch on my contact page. I would love to help share your story!

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