Winter Wonderland

Today was a very snowy day in Roseburg. We actually closed down the park for the day! The only day of the year the park is closed is Christmas, but in the morning the roads were very slick, so they decided to shut the park down to the public. Of course all of us till went in to take care of the animals. I drove Josh's car to wrok since it has nice new snow tires, and mine has old bald tires. His little Hyundai did fine, but on Lookingglass rd there was an SUV in front of me that was sliding all over the place!! They finally pulled over so I scooted past them and drove very slowly up Safari Rd. The fun thing about the snow was the enrichment we got to give to the animals! I took some extra time and made a big snowman for Sarabi and Tau.

Meat chunk Smile!

"Mmm What's this??"

Off with his head!

Val made another small snowman Tau got to destroy :)

In addition to it being cold, snowy, and the park being closed, we had a veterinary exam scheduled on one our grizzly bear boys. This went very well, Mak had a clean bill of health and we got an approximate wight of 500lbs on him. This was a bit less than we had guessed so it was good to actually use the scale. We took turns throughout the day checking on Mak to make sure he recovered from the anesthesia ok. He was still sleepy when we left for the day as anesthesia takes a long time to wear off for bears. The next morning he was back to his old self.

To keep the other two entertained we hid lots of things in their enclosure for them to find. And Phil made a really big snowman for them with nut decorations. They definitely enjoyed their day in the snow.

"What is that?!?"

Oso looked so cute with the Snowman

It did not take him long to destroy it

 

Victor roaming in the snow

Russ scratching her back

Claire had a snowy head

And Russel had fun tromping through it too

  

Relaxing after her snowy day

A Beary Beary Day

Yesterday was a busy day. I did my first tug-of-war training session by myself. Rayna and Phil were there helping, but every other time I have done lion tug-of-war Sarah and Valerie have been with me and I have been just jumping in as needed. So it was cool to do it and be running the show. Unfortunately Sarabi didn't want to play very much, she just wanted to sit there with the rope, but at least she enjoyed herself. Tau did better but we still have to work on the "release" command with him, he just does not want to give up his rope once he has it, even for food. He is getting better but Sarabi is still much better than he is at releasing on command. We also tried a new 2" rope today it was a lot lighter than the 3" rope we tried and I think much better for people to handle, so we may end up using it for the encounters.We also worked on my project again and it is so close to being done it was frustrating to not be able to finish it then. We spent some time down at black bears and got all the yards picked up and the hut sprayed out. I got some nice shots of Takoda sitting on top of the culvert.

Takoda and Donna

Takoda posing all cute

Chochmo eating an orange :)

These three are not that excited about food right now, but they still aren't completely going down for hibernation. We have some cold days coming up though so they may den up for a few days, we will have to wait and see. In the wild these guys would sleep until April, but hibernation is also a learned behavior and Chochmo has never hibernated before. Last year was Takoda's first year going down (he learned from Donna) so it's not that surprising that this year they did not really go down with Chochmo out with them. All the same they have gotten slower and had a decreased appetite. Hopefully next year they will really go down for hibernation.

Today was a very exciting day in Carnivore world. We let our five brown bears out of their den today for the first time since October 31st. Normally we keep these guys in for hibernation until March but they were getting a little more active this year so we decided to let them out a bit early. Now this is a big project because once they are out we have to clean out all the hay (7 bales, 7 bales, and 10 bales) that was in their rooms. I went with Michelle, one of our Cheetah keepers, to let lions out and get those huts cleaned. Then Sarah had us get the power washer from maintenance. By the time we got down there, they had already finished getting all the hay out! So Michelle and I stayed to finish cleaning the huts. We had to hose everything out from top to bottom. This includes the upstairs floor and rafters, the hallway, five rooms, and front room. Once EVERYTHING was sprayed out (this was tough because we had to spray out all the leftover bits of hay) we then had to repeat the whole procedure with the power washer. As Michelle finished a room I would go in and scrub it out with bleach.By the time we finished that whole process it was around 12:20. So we neatened up and went to lunch. After lunch I went back to bear huts with Rayna and we rinsed out all the bleach and squeegeed everything. Because it was their first day out we brought the bears in a bit early, around 3:00. But this meant there was not as much time as we like for the huts to finish drying, so we gave the bears a whole bunch of boxes with their dinner so they could tear them up and make a bed. They had a lot of fun with this. While Val and Rachel were bringing bears in I went down to feed black bears. Takoda happily went in to eat but Donna and Chochmo didn't really care much about their food today. That is a good sign for hibernation. At close I brought up lions with Valerie. We out Sarabi's diet in a box but it did not take her long to go right through it to get her meat. Anyway, here are some picture of Russel and Claire out today.

What are you looking at?

Whatchya doing Russel?

♪ Look for the bear necessities, the simple bear necessities of life!♫

Projects and Bears

Saturday I got to spend a solid chunk of time working on my project, which is getting very close to being done. I can't wait to show the finished product to you all! Once it is done, I will put some pictures up. I also got to spend some time working on some office work, which is always nice because its not usually something we get to focus on. We had a copy of bear diet records from 2008-2010 and another copy of just 2010 through present. So I spent some time going through with Rachel and making sure everything from the 2010 one was on the other, then I was able to delete the 2010 one so we have a complete record of all bear diet changes from 2008-2011 on one document. I then had to go over the hard copy of our records in the bear binder, and make sure it matched the updated one, and then replace that. We did, of course, also handle all our daily chores. Today was a check day for our brown bears. They are getting to be more and more awake and we plan on letting them back out on Wednesday.

Sarabi in a tree

Loves the tree

Sarabi in the tree and Tau smelling something good

Getting more and more awake

But still a little sleepy

In other news we shot our commercial for our tug-of-war encounter on Friday, as I mentioned in the previous post. It went fairly well and at the same time we had some news stations covering a  story on it.

Here are some links:
KEZI News Story

News Review Story- can't access all of it, but thwere is a cute picture :)

KPIC also did a story but it is not up online yet.

Kitties and Puppies

Some exciting things have happened in the last few days. On Wednesday I worked in the Cheetah department as I do every Wednesday for cross-training purposes. It was an average day in cheetah land. Let cats out in drive-thru, let tigers out, med cats, put cats away, pick up pens, prepare diets, feed, and put up tigers. Of course it is a bit more involved than that but that but you get the idea.

Sanurra and Ellie in the drive-thru for the morning

Liz and Cubbies

 However we had a nice break in the day when we went to set up our brand new scale. Our local AZAK chapter saved up the money and purchased this scale for Safari so we could weigh our animals in the field and not only during their physicals (during which they must be anesthetized). This scale is really great too because it weighs up to 1000lbs allowing us to weigh all the animals in the Village, Carnivore, Cheetah departments, and many in the Ungulate department. We got this scale set up and tested it and learned we had to calibrate it. To do that we had to have at least 50lbs and we had to know the exact weight. Fortunately the Village department has a smaller scale so we were able to gather enough items to equal 50lbs, and then 100lbs for the second calibration point. After it was calibrated we got to take it out and put it to the test in the field. We weighed Liz (85lbs) and her two cubs (35 and 31.5lbs), Sanurra, and Taini. Liz and the cubs did great walking right up on the scale to be weighed. They have been doing regular training with them so they are used to coming up to the fence to get some meat chunks. Sanurra and Taini, our two hand raised cats, are easier because we can just go into the pen with them and have them sit on the scale. We will slowly be able to work through to get regular weights on all the cheetahs.

Chimba getting weighed

Lizzie

Switching them around

 The next day I had a bit of a surprise when I went out to my car. It was snowing!! For those of you who don't know snow is pretty rare around here and when it does snow it does not sick much. Being from New England the lack of snow is something new to me, but I got a little taste of home yesterday. I made Tau and Sarabi a small snowman on top of their shade structure in the pen. Of course they knocked it down as soon as they got in there. Here you can see them out in the snow :)

Sarabi climbing in the snow

Checking the snowman

After letting these guys out I actually didn't spend too much time dealing with them because I spent the day shadowing our butcher. J is the one who takes in our animal donations, puts them down, and butchers them. We then cut the meat down into diet sized portions twice a week. However we all need to be able to do J's job in case he is out. I saw the process once before but it was really good to be able to follow J and help him through the whole thing from start to finish. I learned a lot, but I won't be able to do this on my own until I have seen it a few more times. Some of you may dislike the idea that we take in animal donations so I just want to remind you we only take in animals that need to be put down. Also this is the best possible diet we can feed to our animals. Many zoos feed a processed meat which meets all nutritional requirements but it tends to be higher in fat content that feeding whole carcass. Fat is particularly difficult for cheetahs to process and even feeding out carcass meat we have to cut all fat off for them. We also feed out the organs and heads of the animals and these are really healthy for the cats as well. And by giving them meat on the bone it provides extra enrichment for them because it gives them something to work on throughout the night.

After I was done helping J and had taken my lunch I took Ellie for walk. We went for a good hike up along the fire service road that goes behind the park.

The trail we were on, its a tough hike!

Above Safari

Taking  a break

I also want to add in that while I was walking Ellie Sarah and Valerie (Carnivore supervisor and lead keeper) tried to get weights on our lions with the new scale. This did not go as well as hoped. The scale is just short enough the lions will only get halfway on it. We are going to try to build a frame to help hold them in that area. It is big enough for them to sit on, its just they don't want to get up to sit on it when there is plenty of room around it. I will let you all know how this goes once we have a frame for it. I went around and closed all the gates in the park after I put Ellie away.

Just a quick word about today. We spent most of our day preparing for and then shooting a commercial for the new tug of war encounter. While we were shooting for that we also had two local news stations, KPIC and KEZI, and the newspaper, come down to cover this. I will let you know more about this and share the news links tomorrow.

Fun and Games

So we are starting a brand new encounter to offer this summer where the public can get up close and personal with our lions. We are going to be doing a lion tug-of-war encounter. People will be able to come play this game with our lions. We have only been training for maybe two weeks but both Sarabi and Tau love this! They think it is a great game and as soon as you bring them onto the sundeck they are ready for it. We are still modifying our rope and sleeve mechanics as we will be stepping up to a larger rope before we actually begin the encounters. Both lions are doing well with this game but Tau does not really like letting go of the rope once he has it. Sarabi is now doing fantastic though and pretty much always releases the rope on command. I am super excited for this encounter and its really great to see how much the lions enjoy it. And believe me, it is not an easy feat to pull against a lion! And as always here are some pictures for you to see it.

All the Veterinary interns against Sarabi

They really do love this game, as soon as they come up they go over to the pipe to wait for us to put the rope through.

I plan on doing more regular postings now that I am all caught up. They may not be put up every day, but it will be a lot more frequent now. Thanks for reading!

To Sum Up

 Ok so I know I had a long break in posting and I apologize to anyone who may actually read this. As many of you know when I orignally left for Oregon it was for a two month internship. Well two months turned into five, which turned into eight, and before I knew it I was hired and it had been nearly a year since I had been home. So I took a month off of work to travel back home to the foreign soil of Massachusetts. I spent most of December anxiously awaiting my departure and then left the land of Oregon on December 20th. I arrived in Boston at 11:30pm EST. I was reunited with my boyfriend and my cat. I got engaged, met my baby niece, and had a wonderful Christmas with my family. I was able to enjoy three weeks visiting with family and friends and attempting to go through everything I own in preparation to move it all back to Oregon. Then on January 10th I packed as much of my and my fiance's belongings as I could into his little car. And along with my cat and his bird we began a six day drive back to Roseburg. It was an interesting journey and we made, fairly good time, with an extra day at the end for sight-seeing. I went back to work on January 18th. I missed all my animals immensely. Bears were a lot more sleepy then when I left them although the young bears did not completely go down for hibernation, and the cheetah cubs were a lot bigger. So here are some, or a lot, of pictures and videos I have from then until now.

Donna on her pool

This is the last picture I have of Ricky before Hibernation

Sarabi stealing the bowling ball from her room to bring outside

Cubbie (maybe Mohawk) getting weighed on 11/30

Hermano Sleeping

Oso saying Hi

Donna is the cutest bear ever

Takoda picking lunch

Why are you taking another picture of me?!

Loves

Taini

Taini on a walk, taking a break to give Arielle some affectionate licks

Cubbies got a lot bigger, Mohawk on 02/09/11

Mmm Hide Burrito

I think this is Chimba

Nom Nom Nom

Takoda posing

Snugglebunnies

We put her dinner in a box and instead of pulling it out she decided to stick her head through the box and eat it. Don't worry she did get back out of the box.

Leah enjoying a hide burrito

Here are just a few quick videos as well.

Tau playing a game of chase with our truck. He loves doing this, only with our truck though, not other cars.

Sarabi taking her bowling ball outside with her.

Hope you liked looking through these, one more thing to update you all about, but I will leave that for the next post.