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!

More Bears :)

So nothing too big happened between yesterday and today save for one thing, which I will tell you about after some more cute bear pictures, you know you love them!!

Claire bear was sleeping like this when we came in

She got up, moved, and lay back down like this, too cute

 

Chochmo scratching on a rock, makes me think of Baloo in the jungle book!

Finding food, Chochmo up the log structure!

The girls taking a nap

Chomp!

Oso and Mak enjoying their hide burritos for midday enrichment

 Chomping away!!

As previously mentioned there was one big event yesterday. Yesterday was kind of a hectic day as it was just me and Anna, with one of the vet students, Roberto, helping for the day. However, during the afternoon our local news station KPIC came by to do a story on Safari for Spring Break. Dan Brands, the curator asked me if I could do a Big Bear for them. So I had my very first news interview. I have been there when they have done stories and been on footage, but Sarah usually does all the talking. I don't know if I mentioned it, but Sarah and Valerie both went on vacation starting Wednesday and they won't be back until Monday, which leaves me as head of the Carnivore department, and us a bit short staffed for the first few days of Spring break. But so far so good. Anyways back tot he news, Big Bear went smoothly, the reporter seemed to love it, I felt like I talked too much and thought of things I wished I said afterward, but all in all I think it went well. Here is a link to the story, let me know what you guys think!!

KPIC Story

KPIC Video

Bear Training

Today we didn't too much out of the ordinary, but it was nice because we were able to fit in ta lot of training. Rayna did her first session with the brown bear boys today, unfortunately I have no pictures but there will be some up soon. They all did well. They seemed to know more than we thought they did. They have not had training beyond their "Big Bear" behavior (where we have them stand up outside in front of guests for our Big Bear encounters) for a couple years. They all seemed to know Target (put their nose to a stick), Sit, and Sit Up (putting their front paws on the fence with their butt still on the ground). It was really cool to see how well they did after all that time. Rayna will be working with them regularly from now on. Rayna also got some pictures today of our tug-of-war set up for Fresno Zoo. It is really nice to be able to share how we did this with another facility considering it. Of course we got the idea from Busch Gardens who does it with their tigers. Hopefully Fresno will have some luck with this event too. Here are a few pics of the bears I snagged today.

The girls shredded their log overnight

Russ sleeping with her head in the corner

Russel had fun with her frozen cantaloupe for midday enrichment

The boys were waiting patiently for theirs

I was able to train all three black bears. Chochmo is doing very well on his training, he is picking things right up.

Chochmo doing "Sit Up"

All in all, a good day for bears.