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!!!

The Sleeve

Today I worked on a project Sarah gave me looking up cases of pyometra, which is an infection of the uterus, in big cats at our facility. This was sent in by a research student doing her thesis on this subject. I have actually been working on this for the past few days but it is much too big of a project for me to do on my own so the vet students helped me go through the cat records. Unfortunately we don't have all our old records in a computer system so we had to go through all the hard copies by hand. I was able to finish going through the last records with Rayna's help today and should be able to get this project sent back out on time which is by Tuesday. Other than that not much to report form today, but had an exciting event yesterday. First off here is Tau being the adorable lion that he is.

Contemplating Life

Hide Burrito time

 The previously aforementioned excitement is that we finally got the bear sleeve for voluntary blood draws in place. I had been waiting to start Donna on this training until she had "Paw" down but she is doing quite well on it now. So we got the sleeve in place and began training. It took her quite a while to actually put her paw in it, but once she did she repeated the behavior about four times. All in all, a very good first training session.

Set up for training

Trying to reach the berries

Paw in!!

I am so proud of my bear!! She also did this today, but unfortunately she used her other paw. Still, I am glad she had her paw in a gain. The idea is eventually she will grab that black bar and hold it while we shave, spray down, and draw blood from the cephalic vein. It will take a while to get to that point, but we will make it there!! Off for the next three days, and then some very exciting events in the Cheetah Department :) More info coming soon!!

Lion Time

Days 2 and 3 of Spring Break have been pretty busy. They were a bit easier because both me and Rayna worked plus our interns Anna and Andrew yesterday and Andrew today. Lion tug-of-war is very popular, we had 30 people on this encounter yesterday and 35 today!! I am still working on how to work out this encounter and keep it running smooth but I think it is coming out pretty darn good. Today was super busy with encounters, we had our three scheduled daily encounters (Big Bear at 11:00 and 4:00, and Lion T-o-W Fri-Mon Lion 101 Tues-Thurs at 3:00) plus a lion feed tonight. Despite the business I feel we still had a lot accomplished. I do look forward to having Sarah and Valerie back though. I know I can handle things and actually enjoy running the day, but it was just a little stressful with them gone. But here are the best shots of the last few days!

Tau being an adorable goofball

I got stuck in lion tower for a while yesterday. Our tower was late and when guest services called him he said he would be in 45 minutes later. I figured, oh that won't be very long, I'll just sit up there for a few instead of making an intern do it. Two hours late he still hadn't showed and I finally had to swap out with Andrew so I could go get some things done. But it gave me a chance to get some cute pictures of the lions from afar.

Tau and Sarabi in the Right Burm Pen

Laying on the shade structure

Ostrich Dance

Chilling after Tug of War

Natasha was resting like this. She looks like she has no front feet!