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?

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!!

We Have More than Three Black Bears??

Not too much from yesterday but I did want to share this video of Keeno getting his diet out of a box.

 

Not uploading now, will be fixed later

Also a glamor shot of Sarabi

Today both lions and bears got let out a little late because maintenance weed-eated and mowed all the lion yards, and fixed a broken insulator for the hotwire at the bear yards. This put the order of our day off a bit but we still managed to get everything done. Maintenance also got to put out our newly painted brown bear sign. It was a past intern's (Rachel) project to make a write up for the sign and get the painting set up. We just got it back from the painter and it looks great.

Today was also a very exciting day. It was pretty nice weather out and it seems it was just warm enough for our adult black bear boys to make an appearance. The adults have been in hibernation and although we have a had a few sightings of them this is the first time I have seen Ricky come out and eat, and Little Boy at all. So I was pretty excited about it :)

Ricky Bear

Little Boy

I was going to put a video of Ricky eating his diet in a box but blogger is being so slow about uploading videos right now here are some pictures instead. He was super cute.

I should also add in that while I was off Val got weights on Sarabi and Tau. Sarabi is 305 lbs and Tau is 435 lbs. This is pretty close to what our estimates were for them but it was nice to finally know we had an accurate weight on them. We hope to be able to weigh Sarabi every other week so we can monitor her for weight gain in case she becomes pregnant.

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!

Lions and Cub Scouts

We had  a tug-of-war encounter again today but this time for a private group. We used Tau today since we used Sarabi yesterday. My calendar said six adults in the group but I actually had several small children too. I am still working on fitting in my lion talk with the tug-of-war and I have a harder time talking to young children, but thankfully they seemed to like it. All the kids played tug--of-war but most of the time I was talking they got bored and played on the bleachers. The adults did seem interested though so I am hoping it all went over well. Tau did very well, he was still a little slow to let go of the rope but he did without too much trouble. He is getting better at it. I also got in good training sessions with all three black bears today. Takoda does not seem to want to do "lay down" but he still remembers both paws and "Up". Chochmo is doing well on "Target" and starting to learn "Paw". Donna is doing well with all her old behaviors but does not really remember "Paw" which we were just working on before hibernation. Soon I will be able to introduce sleeve training to her, which will allow us to do voluntary blood collection with her. To finish the evening off I had a Bear Feed with about 18 kids and 6 or so adults for Education. They were all cub scouts doing a Camp Tiki program where they spend the night at the park. This was a bit tough because we had to do two groups of about ten people each. I had half come in to see the girls come inside and eat, then half come see the boys, then let the first half back through so they could get a look at the boys too. It was a little complicated but I think it turned out alright and all the kids seemed to enjoy seeing the bears.

All the pictures I snagged today were of Tau being cute on the sundeck but he is adorable.

Rolling around

And back

Rocking that Mohawk

Handsome face

Big Paws

Busy Days

Today we had one of the vet students, Tony, helping us out for the day and Sarah brought her Mom down to see how we let lions and bears out in the morning. We sprayed some perfume in the pens for the lions and Sarah put a little on the fence as we let Keeno out. he was rubbing all over it. I managed to catch the last bit before he went all the way into his pen.

We left Anna, our new intern, to clean lion huts by herself while we got bears out. We picked up both the yards today which let us spread some apples, nuts, dressing, craisins, and feta cheese around in the enclosures for the bears to find. Tony and I got bear huts all done, which actually left us with both huts all cleaned before 11:00. So we got to go to QB and got all of our diet prep done before lunch, which is always nice. After lunch we went out to do some lion training. It was really nice because we have been doing so much with the tug-of-war I had not run through all three lions basic behaviors for a while. Before Keeno came over I got a super cute pic of him and Natasha lying just over the burm.

The cutest couple

We did had to walk through Hut Tree Pen (HTP) to go train Tau and Sarabi since we out them in our off display Lower Breeder Pen (LBP) for today, just for a change of pace for them. They both did well during training, and even though Sarabi did not want Tau to train after her, they were both very nice to each other, and we did get her distracted enough so I could work with him.

Muddy kitty

Tau had a blast playing with his blue barrel after training.

We did have some issue getting out of HTP because all three ostriches decided to graze in the lion drive-thru. This normally isn't an issue but we don't want to be out of our vehicles close to them. At least with the two females I can keep an eye on them and make it to the truck if they aren't too close but the male can be fairly aggressive so we had to wait until one female stopped pecking the truck, then Anna had to distract the male, Dezi, down the fence line, while I snuck out and got into the truck to drive it up to the gate so Tony and Anna could safely get in. But we did eventually make it out of lion drive-thru. Then we went off to do a Big Bear training session with the boys. That is where we have the grizzlies stand up on their hind legs on command. When we do an encounter we talk about bears, have them stand up, then let the public throw food over for them. Today I just showed Tony how to do the training and let him do it and get a few pictures. After that we went to black bears and I got to do training with all three of them. We just started training back up with them since hibernation. Last year Donna was my project bear to train and this year I will be training all three young black bears. i am pretty excited about this and really looking forward to getting the training program underway. Donna remembered most of her behaviors but has some trouble with Lay Down. Paw was the newest one we left off on and she doesn't seem to have that. Takoda did very well, he remembered both Paws, Up, and Target, but not Sit or Lay Down. With Chochmo I just worked on Target since that is all he learned last year but soon we ill be able to work on more. After that we finished up chores and got to go visit the cheetah cubbies. Anna had never met them before so we did some training with them and Sheilah, our docent in cheetah lodge, was nice enough to take some pictures for us! There are a lot but I am just going to put up some of my favorites. These are all Sheilah's and copyrighted.

Chimba

Mohawk

Doing some "Ups"

Tony and Anna

Family

All Done

I know there are a lot of cubbie pics, but I just couldn't decide which ones to post, so I did a bunch =D