It's not easy being green

It's been mostly quiet this past week but a few exciting events to note. On Thursday we had a delay getting brown bears out. Simultaneously we had maintenance fixing a gate that had loose latch and Ungulate Dept. was dealing with a sick bison that Rayna noticed laying next to the bear drive-thru. So we had to wait a while for all the excitement to clear before we could send the brown bears out. But they did get out with a newly reinforced gate.

Chochmo playing in his newly rebuilt log pile

Tau hiding

 Donna is progressing very well on her sleeve training, hopefully we will move on to having clippers around soon. This will get her accustomed tot he noise of the clippers and eventually to being shaved to allow us better access to her veins while her arm is in the sleeve.

Poke poke!

 Village spent all mroning Friday cleaning out their gibbon pond. The gibbons recieved their physicals whole the pond was draine, cleaned, and refilled. In the process of cleaning it they pulled out a bunch of tadpoles and a few frogs and offered them to us for bear enrichment. We put tadpoles in boxes for the brown bear girls and some frogs in a bucket for brown bear boys.

Well of course Osos knocked over the bucket very quickly. And the next mroning the girl's room looked like this:

Believe it or not most of those tadpoles were still alive in the morning. So we put them back in the barrel, which we then gave to black bears that evening.

Snuggle Puddle

Mmm Cauliflower.

With mustard, everything is better!

Teddy Bear Picnic in just over a week!!!

Fish and Puppets

Wednesday we managed to get weights again on Tau and Sarabi again. Tau is at 426 and 313. The difference form last time is probably normal body fluctuations. I know humans can fluctuate up to 2 lbs daily so I assume lions fluctuate as well. By getting these weekly weights we will have a good baseline for when Sarabi does become pregnant we can monitor her weight gain. We have been using hay to bed Keeno because he seems to have developed some type of pressure sore by his ankle. He is getting medication for it and a spray on disinfectant. However the use of hay for his bedding has also given us some good enrichment. The bears seem to like stinky lion hay in boxes :)  We had three interviews for our summer internship position. One we really liked and are going to offer her the internship but we are going to hold off filling the third spot and see if we can get a few more interviews in.

"Hey Russ, what's in that? It smells funny"

Fruitsicles are awesome

Mmmm Frozen pineapple

Couldn't resist taking this, babies are getting big!

 Thursday I set myself a daunting task; to clean the lion pool in HTP. This was made even more challenging by the fact that we tried goldfish for lion enrichment, and while the lions ignored them it seems the fish managed to survive in the pond for several weeks. So I had to try an catch these little guys as I was draining out the pool! I did manage to catch all of them, seven total in addition to the three we pulled out the other day. The pol was cleaned and looks sooo much nicer!! I decided to take one of these guys home to be a friend for the one I took home last time (sadly, since then both fish have passed on). The rest we gave to the Education Dept. to use for enrichment.

Fishies!!

Sarabi enjoying her spool in the Upper Breeder Pen (UBP)

They are too cute!

Pthhhhh!

Ricky getting food from his barrel feeder. Got to love seeing them use something you helped design!

And Tau gets to enjoy his clean pool on Friday!!

"I know there is something in here!"

Saturday i conducted my very first interview. Rayna took notes while I asked all the questions. We decided to offer out interviewee the third spot in our summer internship, so now we just have to sort out all the details. 

Donna and Chochmo

 We have also been working on preparing items for the Teddy Bear Picnic event. We put together a bunch of informational packets to pass out and we are going to do bear bag puppets as a arts and crafts project. Of course we needed some model puppets so Rayna, Anna, and I all made our own bear puppet, so we can show one to each of our three vehicles.

Rayna's, Anna's, and Angie's

What do you guys think?