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?

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.