By David Zalubows­ki, The Asso­ci­at­ed Press

DENVER — Kat­ri­na Eschweil­er has 3,000 hun­gry din­ers to sat­is­fy every day of the year, an envi­able client base for any eatery in these tur­bu­lent times. But they’re not your usu­al clientele.

They’re the year-round inhab­i­tants of the Den­ver Zoo, and feed­ing more than 450 species is a painstak­ing, seri­ous busi­ness. The coro­n­avirus has made the task more daunting.

The zoo was closed near­ly three months ear­ly in the pan­dem­ic, then imposed restric­tions on crowd sizes since reopen­ing to the pub­lic June 12. That has cut into prof­its and led the zoo to join oth­er zoos around the coun­try in turn­ing to sup­port­ers ask­ing for dona­tions to cov­er the near­ly $1 mil­lion annu­al food bud­get for the facility’s denizens.

The hay and veg­eta­bles for Grou­cho, a 12,000-pound Asian ele­phant, costs $76,000 a year.

“It costs us about $100,000 per day to oper­ate the zoo, and $1 mil­lion per month on ani­mal care alone. Although we’re open and wel­com­ing guests to the zoo each day, we’re still fac­ing a sig­nif­i­cant deficit,” said Bert Vescolani, pres­i­dent and CEO.

Over a year, the nutri­tion team will han­dle 400 tons of food, every­thing from frozen mice for rap­tors to fish from New­found­land for the sea lions. Every day, the nutri­tion team mem­bers for­mu­late, pre­pare and deliv­er hun­dreds of pounds of hay, meat, fish, veg­eta­bles, fruit, grain and oth­er items to the ani­mals, said Bri­an Aucone, the zoo’s senior vice pres­i­dent for ani­mal sciences.

And like the trendi­est of restau­rants, the Den­ver Zoo feeds its charges as much local­ly sourced food as pos­si­ble. Almost all of the meat for the car­ni­vores comes from local pro­duc­ers, which employ­ees say helps reduce the zoo’s car­bon foot­print and the need to store larg­er quantities.