Feathered Friends

So today was kind of  a slow day we aren't checking the brown bears until tomorrow. Me, Mandy, and Rachel were working. But because we had some extra time today we were able to spend some extra time with the animals, which is always nice. For morning enrichment we through over some meatsicles for the lions.

Sarabi enjoying her meatsicle.

We got to work a little bit on making some paaper mache enrichmentfor the animals, which is always fun, and Shannon, one of the village keepers paid us a visit with Carmen the Cockatoo.

They were dancing :)

I also spent some time breaking our lion tower, which was a nice pause in the day for me. We have a tower set up near the lion drive thru, bear drive thru, and a lodge in the cheetah area. We have volunteers who stay there all day to keep an eye on the animals and the customers. As a cheetahs intern I did bear tower once a week and broke towers or filled in as needed but I rarely do so now. Usually giving the towers their lunch breaks is something the interns do but every once in a while its really nice to do it because it gives us a chance to sit and relax and just watch the animals. We had some to train the lions as well after that. We actually trained Tau and Sarabi twice today which is always really great for them, and for me too since I really like training. When we went to black bears today we got to spend some time getting all three yards cleaned. We are feeding them all their least favorite foods so they are more inclined to go into hibernation.

I fed Takoda some lettuce. He would never eat this in the summer.

It was pretty rainy today, and cold, so I was wearing lots of layers with my tight raincoat over them. We didn't see any of the adult bears out today to eat, they are definitely getting sleepier. At the end of the day we gave the lions some chickens for dinner. As I have mentioned they usually eat horse meat but every once in a while we have some chickens donated. We like to give these to the lions whole, it gives them a nice change of diet and its a good form of enrichment as well. Sarabi will eat all of her chickens but Keeno and Natasha will actually pluck their chickens first.

Natasha plucking her chicken :)

To finish off the day I spent some time at the intern house, and I just had to include some about that because there was another visitor there too.

Willie, the Village department's amabassador wallaroo, was spending the night with Jen, the Village intern. He goes home with a different keeper every night, and will until he is old enough to be on his own.

(This is a terrible pic of me, but he is sooo cute) This was a god end to the day :)

Monday time

And now this brings us back to my Monday, which in real life terms is Sunday, but I guess it is now technically Monday since its 1am... Anyways, we had a lot of people working in Carnivores today. Both me and Valerie were on today, but we also had all three of our interns, Mandy, Rayna, and Rachel, and Arielle was cross-training in Carnivores. As mentiones before our bears are hibernating right now which means we ahve a lot of spare time on our hands. So with six people on today and a fairly light chore load we were able to work on a few extra things. Rachel ended uo helping out in cheetahs for the day, which gave us one less person. In the mroning we spent some time watching the lions play which was really nice. Once busy season hits are day will be extremely hectic so I am really enjoying being able to just enjoy watching the animals. Mandy and Rayna cleaned huts while the rest of us did some individual work in the office. We were also able to work a chute we are setting up to help prepare Tau for training to do voluntary blood draws. This is something we are hoping to be able to teach him over the winter. Val has primarily been working on the chute so I was glad I had the opportunity to see it today. I think it will work out nicely and I am looking forward to working on this with him. Valerie does all the primary training with the lions, but I still train all the behaviors they already know.

Today was a check day for the brown bears (we are now checking in on them every other day) and we happened to get a Hibernating Bear Encounter sign up just before we went out there. In a hibernating bear encounter the public is able to come out to the bear hust, we give them a little introductiona dn talk about bears, then bring them inside the huts (where everyone has to be very quiet) so they can see the bears close up, then we go back out and answer any questions. These encounters will be pretty common over the season so I am going to have to get back into the swing of doing them from intern days.

When we went to black bears we scattered their food throughout one of their pens and I got some cute pictures of them eating (I know you guys thought picture time would never come).

 Takoda found the food I left on the spool.

All three! look Donna and Chochmo are sharing!!

After black bears we managed to sneak in some time with the lions so Val could show me the new behaviors they've been working on.

 Sarabi's "sit up" needs a bit of work but it's super cute! *warning gruesome picture coming up*

 Keeno and Natasha's diets for the night. We have a program where farmer's bring us horses that need to be euthanized and we take them in, put them down, and feed them out. The farmer's save the cost of a vet bill and body disposal (and actually geta tax write off) and we are able to feed all the carnivores for free.

 Keeno had very muddy paws.

Tasha enjoying her meal.

Deja vu anyone?

So now we are at November 18, 2010. Today was my cross-training day in the Cheetah department. I actually spent most of the morning cutting diets, which involves cutting our legs of meat down into diet sized pieces for the tigers, cheetahs, and lions. This is a task that is done twice a week with all the cheetah and carnivore keepers rotating who does it ona week to week basis. After that I helped clean tiger huts and went in with Arielle to do a love session with Taini. Taini is their ambassador cheetah, she was hand-raised and is specially trained to be able to walk on a leash and go off grounds. When I say we did a love session I really mean Arielle did a love session and I stood there as her back up (its a two person protocol to go in with the cheetahs). Taini is picky about who she likes and will pretty much ignore anyone who is not one of her regular trainers. But still it was nice to go in with the cheetahs again. I was also able to train Saigon, their male Amur tiger, while Arielle trained his sister Leah. This was soemthing I did as an intern and it was really nice to be able to do so again. Training Saigon isn't too different formt he lions, but he is a bit taller than the lions when he stands all the way up. At some point after that me, Arielle, and Phil picked up drive-thru. That is basically what it sounds like, we went into all the drive-thru exhibits and cleaned the pens. All the cheetahs are free contact at Wildlife Safari, which means we go directly in the pens with them. Cheetahs are flight response animals so we are able to move them off. Me and Arielle finished off the day with a fun project, making papr mache footballs!! We are working on an event called Civil War Day. Out here in oregon there is some serious competition betweent he two college football teams the Ducks and the Beavers. So when they play eachother its called Civil War and this year Wildlife Safari has created an event around this competition. It should be pretty fun but I will wait to tell you about it until it occurs. In any case we had some fun getting paper mache everywhere as we tried to cover balloons and make them look like footballs. I don't have any pictures of this day because I forgot my camera, but I figured I would put up some of my favorite pictures of my time in cheetahs.

 Taini, grooming Phil.

Kira eating.

 Andiamo

 Addison and Mocossa. These two are sisters and have since been separated. In the wild females are solitary so these two had to be separated as they are reaching maturity in order to breed them.

 I told you Saigon was tall ( and he is small for an Amur tiger!)

He is so good wwith his training :)

This is one of my all time favorite pictures from Safari. Me with Sanurra, one of our hand-raised cats.

Keeper Cross over

Had a few interesting things on November 16, 2010. Not only did I work with my interns but I had one of the cheetah keepers, Phil, working with me as well. What was really interesting is that I was a Cheetah intern under Phil, who is the lead Cheetah keeper, but today I was in charge of him in Carnivores. I felt a bit weird about this but it went pretty well. At 10:30am we went to the theatre to watch Benji (the vet) give a presentation on Fossil Rim Wildlife Center's cheetah program, whcih he was able to see when he went to Texas for a conference. It was really interesting to see the set up at another facility. Me and Phil also got the chance today to look at some designs for a hammock made out of old firehose. I am looking into building one for the lions and Phil has some experience building them. He very nicely offered to help me building mine. Hopefully this will be able to be a bit of a project to accomplish this winter. So nothing else major to report from today but I do want to share this super cute picture of Tkoda muching on his dinner :) We hid it in the big tire and put a bunch of logs on top.

Bobbing for Squash

Ok, ok, I know I am like five days behind, and I apologize. What can I say, I lost track one night and it was a snowball effect. And I had two days off of intensive laziness therapy. But back to the blog.

On Monday November 15, 2010 we tried something new with our lions. As mentioned in the last post we filled up the black bear pond for our lions. This morning we put a few squash and Sarabi's favorite orange ball into the pond. And let me preface this by saying lions do not normally like water. See for yourself what they did.

This is after a few attempts at batting around the outside. After about twenty minutes he was fine with going right in. And he continued playing in the pool for over an hour after this!!

Tau was a gentleman and pulled Sarabi's ball out for her.

She also carried this around the pen in her mouth.
It was a pretty typical day after that. I did get to put some work on typing up some old notes from 2006 on vet procedures from the time. I also updated our bear diet records and did a bit of organizing in our lion binder. However it is in need of more work than I was able to give it at the time so hopefully I will be able to get back to it. For the bear diets we keep careful track of how much food they are getting throughout the year and record it every time we change their diet. This allows us to look at their past diets and determine how much they should get at one time of year. As for the later end of the day we tried giving Natasha a deer leg for dinner. I just wanted the share this.

She had fun carrying around the room, but apparently she wasn't a big fan because she didn't end up eating too much of it (don't worry we gave her a bit extra the next day).Still doesn't she look like a true lioness?

More to come for the next few days!

Lazy Lions and Sleepy Bears

So today was a rather rainy drizzly day, typical for Oregon winter. I spent most of my morning at lion huts today. Here I received my typical morning greeting,

 Tau got a little lazy there towards the end.

We put our three year old pair, Sarabi and Tau, out in the Right Burm Pen, or RBP, today, and the older two, Keeno and Natasha, in the Lower Breeder Pen, or LBP. We also have two other pens in our exhibit area, the Upper Breeder Pen (next to LBP) and the Hut Tree Pen (next to RBP). Normally the kids go out into HTP and the adults into RBP with a switch on Wednesdays and Saturdays, but today we were doing some work in the HTP so we did things a bit different. We recently pulled out one of the black bear pools from their area since they are beginning to settle down to hibernate. Today we brought that pool into HTP and filled it. So, tomorrow we will put a ball and a few squash into the pool for the kids to play with, expect some great pics to come! For the pens we put the lions in today we spread some flavorings for them to smell. We try to do a different form of enrichment every day, whether it be scent, toy, or food enrichment. Sarabi and Tau had some brandy and lemon flavoring while Keeno and Natasha had vanilla extract and soy sauce. They do seem to like scent enrichment, rolling in it or rubbing on the objects we put stuff on, but I think they like perfume or elephant poo a little better than the flavoring. Still it was something interesting for them to sniff. Me and Mandy, one of our three interns, cleaned lion huts today and since the days have had a bit more free time since the bears went down we did a few extra things too. We made some new boxes to help keep out cabinet organized, cleaned off the glove tote (the lid was all covered in meat germs and icky) , and as previously mentioned, got the pool filling tomorrow. But just before we left I got some great footage of Sarabi actually being NICE to Tau. Now if you know anything about lions you may know males are the dominant ones. Well unfortunately Sarabi and Tau missed that memo. Sarabi beats up on poor Tau a lot. His whole back end is covered in scars from her, but he practically never retaliates. Here you can see a rare occurrence of Sarabi being affectionate :)

You may notice how he backs away from her. Still its nice to know she cares.

After we were done at lions we headed down to visit our young black bears. I managed to catch a shot of Donna and Takoda snuggling.

 And Chochmo was begging for a treat.

After black bears we headed to QB, essentially field headquarters for the Carnivore and Cheetah Departments, and worked on some projects (to be discussed at a later date) and made up bear diets. Mind you to make bear diets we go into our giant walk in cooler, and on a day like today it was COLD. I had to wear two big sweatshirts! The rest of the day slid by in a series of projects with some office work (typing up old notes on some vet procedures done in 2006, it was kind of fun!) thrown in. Then we got to head back out to black bears to feed everyone.  We also got to go in side B to clean up and scrub out the pool, which we have not been able to do for a while so it was really nice to get things cleaned up there. Here are just some pictures of feeding time.

Who ever said don't play with your food?

Food set up for the kids, looks like a feast doesn't it?

And lastly,

A nice shot of Little Girl, one of our adult black bears, all snuggled in her culvert for hibernation.


The rest of the evening went pretty smoothly. We fit in some lion training and stopped off at black bears one more time to give the kids their evening dose of meds. We are giving them a preventative round of antibiotics before they go down for the winter. Anyways, hope everyone liked today's pics, more to come tomorrow!

My Kitties of the Smaller Variety

Today was a day off for me, so I really have nothing to report on the work front. However in other exciting news, I now have a real bed in my apartment (as opposed to an air mattress) and watched some fabulous movies tonight at the intern house. Now since I did not work today I figured I would introduce you all to the little beasties I see outside of work.

 The fuzzy love of my life, Louie. He is currently still in MA with my parents but is moving out here very soon.

He loves sitting on people's shoulders.

How can you not love that face?

 Devil, one of my roommate's cats, he is a great snuggle buddy.

 Nap time is the best!

Kumar, my roommate's other kitty. He secretly enjoys cuddle time (Shhhh, don't tell anyone!), and yes he is a massive boy.

"If I can't see you, you can't see me!"


Hope you all enjoyed! More on zoo life tomorrow!!

Introduction to My World

So, I am pretty sure everyone who would possibly read this blog already knows, but I am going to give some background information about me anyways. I am twenty-three years old and have always been passionate about animals. I was the kid that decided they wanted to be a veterinarian at about five, and stuck with it. I even went to an Agricultural high school majoring in Veterinary Sciences. It was during high school I began debating on whether or not I actually wanted to ebcome a vet, but I continued on to college as a Pre-vet major. Well after struggling through chemistry I decided I was not going to put myself through more difficult science classes when I wasn't sure I really wanted to be a vet, and I switched to Animal Science. It was aorund then when I started thinking about zookeeping, as I had always been interested in wild and exotic animals. Even when I was thinking of vet work I had been thinking of doing exotic animals. So I began looking into becoming a zookeeper. I finished college with a Bachelors Degree in Animal Science and went through a long period of time applying for internships. To get a job in this field you pretty much have to have two or three internships under your belt, and nearly all of them out there are unpaid. I managed to get accepted as a Carnivore intern at Wildlife Safari somewhat as a fluke. I actually applied to the cheetah internship and was denied, but the carnivore deoartments intern left early. The cheetah deoartment then said "hey we really liked this girl you should hire her" and they did. So I spent two months as a Carnivore intern, and then I managed to stay on as a Cheetah intern. I never would have been able to afford it without the help of my Auntie, but she did help me, so I managed the five months unpaid. After that I was lucky and a temporary position opened up in the carnivore department. Basically I was filling in until the keeper they actually hired could make it out there. But then, as luck would have it again, (for me anyways, maybe not the department since it left them scrambling a bit) another keeper got a job elsewhere and left. So then I was promoted form temp, to full time. Now I have been working at Wildlife Safari as a Carnivore keeper for five months now, and I am loving every minute of it!! I work with four African lions, five North American black bears, and five brown bears (two of which are Alaskan Coastals, and three grizzly bears). On this blog I will share with you the ins and outs of work, and some of my favorite pictures of these animals. I take pictures pretty much every day I work so I need a good place to show them to you all.

Right now the most recent development in our department is that the brown bears have all been kept inside for hibernation. We induce hibernation in our brown bears by slowly reducing their diet, and then we bring them into their rooms on Halloween, which they are used to going into at night, and keep them inside. Once they are going to the bathroom less, usually about two or three days afterwards, we will put 8 bales of hay in their rooms, which they make into nests. Currently the girls, our two Alaskan Coastal bears Russel and Claire, are pretty much sleeping and no longer going to the bathroom, while our three five-year-old grizzly boys Victor, Mak, and Oso, our still a little up and down. They are still going to the bathroom  and we are still offering them some dog food. We will continue offering them food as long as they are going to the bathroom and continue to be interested in eating. It is a little sad to have them in this state as we have to limit are interaction with them. But they are really cute all snuggled up in their hay, and this process of hibernation is good for them as they will come out of it at a very healthy body weight and with brand new paw pads. I think I have rambled on enough for this first post, so to wrap you up I will leave you with some adorable sleepy bears pics. Hope you enjoy! Feel freee to leave any questions you may have in the comments :)

The three boys when we first put their hay in on 11/03/10. They had fun digging around. They have since dragged hay into their two other rooms as well.

Russel, who is 22 years old, snuggled up on 11/08/10
Russel and Claire have to be separated into two separate rooms because Russ will steal all the hay and make a big nest for herself leaving Claire only a little bit. But they still have a window so they can see each other during the whole hibernation.

 Claire, who is 21 years old, snuggled on 11/08/10

Russel 11/09/10

Hope you all enjoyed this :)