New Treats

Just a few things of note for this past week. We were able to get weights on Tau and Sarabi. Tau is now at 429lbs and Sarabi 312lbs. We are trying to get weekly weights on Sarabi so that when she becomes pregnant we will have a really good baseline weight for her. Maintenance got some weed eating done at black bears which is great because the grass grows very fast. The adult boy black bears, Ricky and Little Boy, are out and about quite a bit now, which is great because I can begin to work on training with them. We are also in the process of trying new training treats since our dried berry supply is nearly exhausted. I tried honey water but they did not really care for it. I also tried protein shakes which they love for enrichment, but no interest for training. So far our winner has been frozen grapes, they seem to be working well for those.

Ricky bear waiting to go get his food

Babies are starting to come out!

Donna watching the weed eating

Ricky and LB snuggling

Happily married couple

 So far Ricky has just begun target training and is doing well with it. LB I am just working on clicker association and getting him used to being near me, as he is a little people shy. But so far so good!

Target!

Keeper Shadow in Portland

This week I got a very special opportunity. I was able to travel up to the Oregon Zoo in Portland and spend a day shadowing their keepers. This was an amazing experience for me and I learned a lot. I cannot post all of my pictures as there are far too many, but I will share a bit of what I saw and learned with you guys. I spent most of my time in the Marine Life area as they care for the polar bears and sun bears. Nicole was extremely helpful and gave me some ideas on training. It was great to see how their program ran. I even got to see them get weights on the polar and sun bears!

Sun Bear getting some morning meds in pudding. Yum!

Conrad with toys

Awesome bear firehose bed. I want to make one! But that is a whole new project.

Saying hi

Big Claws

Open. My next goal for the black bears! This is a great tool for checking their teeth!

They are trained to lay on their side.

I was also able to spend some time with one of the keepers for the black bears. Julie was also very helpful and it was really great to bounce training ideas around with another keeper from a different facility. I was able to see some training they do with their black bears.

Target

Touch desensitization.

I just want to note that she is just lightly touching the bear with the stick. This is a great way to work the bear up to things like hand injections. Hand injecting allows us to give the animal its' vaccines or any medications it may need without having to anesthetize it. The more we can do like this the less we need to put the animal under anesthesia for medical work, which is a lot of stress taken off their bodies. This is a great method I would love to eventually work into our program.

Their youngest bear, also named Takoda!

Lastly I was able to see some sleeve training done with one of their monkeys. She is diabetic and sleeve trained to allow them to do her insulin shots. As I am working on sleeve training our black bear Donna this was really interesting for me to see.

A Big Big thanks to all the keepers at Oregon Zoo who allowed me to follow them around for the day and pester them with questions. It was a fantastic learning experience for me.

And this was way too cool not to post. While I was there I visited their Lorakeet Landing exhibit. You can  buy a small container of nectar and go in and feed it to the birds. It was so much fun!

Wildlife Safari will be opening a similar Budgie exhibit with the addition of the new Australia exhibit in our Village area. Be sure to come check it out once it's open!

Safari Easter

Now I was not working on Easter so I personally did not take any except for the first two of these photos, nor can I say much for what actually happened that day, but I had to share some of the Easter fun with you guys!

Easter Eggs we dyed for the lions and bears!

Anna worked very hard on these ones, the rhea eggs took forever to actually get colored!

Me and Anna had a lot of fun coloring the eggs on Friday. She made big buckets with food coloring and vinegar for the rhea eggs, but the coloring didn't stick so well. I had colors from an Easter egg kit I used on the goose eggs, I helped a little on the rhea eggs by combining colors to get enough dye to dip them into. This was also a nice sit down activity for me that weekend since I was hit pretty hard with a cold.

Unfortunately we have no lion pictures for you to see since I was told Sarabi smashed all the eggs before they could get out there to get pictures. I guess she was ready for her Easter Egg Hunt that morning!
All photo/video credits below to Sarah Roy.

Saigon enjoying his paper mache egg with meat chunks inside.

Leah with hers

Claire with her paper mache

The boys

So many eggs to choose from!

And lastly, the girls with their (prettily colored!) rhea eggs.

Training Goals

So Tuesday we got to spend a little time in the Cheetah Department and watch them do a voluntary blood draw on Sanurra. That means we were able to a blood draw without anesthetizing her. She has been trained to lay in a special chute and allow us to take blood from her tail vein while she is getting treats. This is the ultimate goal with all our training, being able to perform behaviors that allow us to give better care to our animals. Sanurra is one of our hand raised cheetahs so we can interact with her closely like this. We are doing weekly blood draws on her to ascertain her hormone levels and we will hopefully be able to tell whether or not her AI took and she is in fact pregnant. Even if she is not pregnant reviewing her levels on a weekly basis will be a great help to the ongoing study of AI in cheetahs.

Anna sitting in to help Benji

Sanurra getting her treats from Michelle

 Not much else of note happened over the next few days, but we did receive some rhea and goose eggs from the Ungulate Department which we dyed some fun colors for Easter. Pictures to come soon. Enjoy some shots of the bears this week :)

Oso being sleepy

Mak and Victor enjoying their boxes

 The adult black bears are waking up more and more!

Just soo sleepy

Tau is so relaxed.

Bear Enrichment!!

So since this post is not being updated in actual time, I am just going to give you a few pics I wanted to share. These are pretty much all from April 14 and 15.

Claire Bear

Russ enjoying her apples

Anna with giant apple

Can you find the black bear?

I just had to not the pile of grass these guys brought to their culvert or "den"

Sleepy time

Giant box smeared with peanut butter

All kinds of fun!

How to get a weight on a black bear! Takoda

Bear Tracks, can you tell which are front and which are back feet?

Visitors and Science

This past week was a little hectic and our days were not quite run the way they normally are. We had some very special events taking place. We had a team from the National Zoo in D.C. come down and attempt artificial insemination on three of our cheetahs. This took place over two days, April 6 and 7. So we had the time to see these events take place and help the Cheetah team with anything they needed we really had to work to crank our everything we could in the morning on both days. The first step to the A.I. is to anesthetize the male they are going to use and collect semen by a process called electroejaculation. Then they anesthetize the female and check to see if she is ovulating. They make two small incisions, one for a small camera, and one for a probe tool. All three females underwent hormone injections to help ensure they would be cycling. However, each of the cheetahs are on a  different hormone program as they are currently testing out four different protocols to see which one works best. The first day they knocked down Timbou, and then Mocossa. Unfortunately she was not ovulating and could not be inseminated. Now this could have been due to the hormone protocol she was given, or she could be in the 30% of cats who do not respond to the hormones. For day two I was in charge but ran the day basically the same as Val had the day before. We had huts done, diets made, and bear huts set up before 11:00. Kira was the first female up for the day and she was also unable to be inseminated because she was not ovulating. Lastly we tried for Sanurra. Sanurra had two, and maybe three, promising looking follicles so they were able to go ahead and inseminate her. This procedure only has a 30% success rate so it would be fantastic if she conceives. Another great thing is that with Sanurra , because she was hand raised, we can do ultrasounds and take weekly blood samples which will tell us whether or not she is pregnant. Cheetahs can have false pregnancies where they show all the signs of being pregnant but never give birth. It will be really good to know for sure if she is pregnant.

In other news Donna is doing very well at sleeve training. I have introduced a command to it and she is doing it consistently.

Here is my week with the black bears.

The Three Stooges, we played with bubbles for a bit

 

Little Girl actually came halfway out of her culvert

The boys playing

Such cute faces!

Bear loves

Momo face (Chochmo)

Sleepy Donna

Claw marks on their climbing structure

And my pics for lions and brown bears this past week.

They love their hide burritos

Tau is so cute in the morning

Keeno and Tash enjoying the sun.

Looking little like a beached whale <3

Rayna is 5' 2" she is standing ina tunnel the girls dug over two days. The roof fell in overnight.

"Just five more minutes!"

 Hope you enjoyed, keep your fingers crossed for future cheetahs cubs! Her is Tau saying goodbye!