So, as promised yesterday, I returned to Red Wolf today. It was a good day because I did not have to shovel bear poo first thing in the morning. Paul had a small tour coming in, so he assigned me to making up the bear food and cleaning out the mouse cages. Paul keeps a bunch of live mice for feeding purposes. He instructed me that there should be one male mouse per cage, and that all extra males should be put in a separate bachelor pad. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, it turns out that I am not very good at telling the males apart from the females. Also, I had three escapees that I managed to re-capture. I am actually pretty proud of myself for this feat. Mice are slippery little buggers. I didn't even get bitten!
Paul Returning from a Tour
The mouse mission pretty much took all morning because of the whole "Is this a male or a female?" dilemma. When I finally finished that task up, I took a quick break to photograph the rain clouds. Indiana is experiencing a pretty bad drought right now, so the rain is a big deal. All the flowers were very happy. The weather was still hot and muggy, but at least the place wasn't a dust bowl any longer.
After sightseeing briefly, I realized that I was hungry and that the bears were probably hungry too. So, I took the bear food down to the bears. It was so strange to put bear food into the cages without having to actually clean anything. I liked it.
After lunch (yes, PB&J), I hung out with Rosie. She was very calm today, probably because there wasn't a whole bunch of people there to get her all excited.
By the third time that Rosie ninja-attacked my camera lens, I was ready to move on with the day. Paul was still not back from his afternoon outing (he was trying to get someone to print more business cards for him), and he had given me permission to use one of the ATVs to go exploring. So I set forth with my camera and took some photos.
One must take time to stop and smell the flowers
One wink...
Two winks...
All of the winking going on above makes me think that these two wolves have some sort of conspiracy going on. I think they did a Rain Dance and made it rain, but that is just my personal theory. I tried to make them howl with some recordings of howling that I have on my phone, but they weren't impressed. By the time I was finished with taking a bunch of photos and bothering wolves with sound recordings, Paul was back and it was time to process a roadkill deer.
Paul let me do this one mostly on my own. It was a little more than gross, since it had been hit by a car and all of its organs were displaced and a couple of bones were broken. Also, it was turning green because of bruising, and it didn't smell so hot because it had been sitting out for a day or two. But I'll stop the details there, because I'm nice.
And that's it. My last day at Red Wolf until August.
P.S. I forgot to write about this yesterday - When I helped guide the tour on Tuesday, I learned that the bear Pocahontas was originally owned by a lady who really wanted a baby but couldn't have one. Instead, she opted to buy a baby bear. She proceeded to take hundreds of photos of this bear in little outfits. She was kept on cement outside for all of her life, so her feet rotted. That's why Pocahontas can't walk very well. And that's why she hates people so much (as evidenced when she charges the bars whenever someone walks by).
Since I didn't post yesterday, I bet you might have thought that I slacked off again this week. It is a reasonable conclusion, considering my past track record. However, this is not the case. You see, I did not even get home from Red Wolf until 10 P.M yesterday evening. I decided to stay late to help Paul with a big tour. But I'll get into details about all that later. Many things occurred before this late-evening tour, and I want to cover them first.
The morning was not the typical bears-first morning. When I arrived, Paul was in the office with two new volunteers. Upon walking into the office, Paul says "Look, new meat!". I'm sure that made them feel good. Anyways, once the two other regular volunteers arrived, we set upon the first task of the morning, which was releasing that red-shouldered hawk back into the wild. I took a video of it and spent two hours uploading it onto YouTube, so I am going to take this opportunity to shamelessly insert it here:
You may have noticed that at the very end of the video, one of the newbies said that the release was anti-climactic. I disagree. I thought it was incredible to witness such a beautiful bird returned to the wild, where it belongs. Also, did you hear the bird calling in the beginning of the film? Isn't it beautiful? It makes me think of mountains and big sky country. The hawk did not go too far away at first; it just landed in a nearby tree. Its presence greatly upset the mockingbirds, as seen in the photo below.
After releasing the hawk and disturbing the mockingbirds, we took care of the bears. Imagine, if you will, that it is 93º F outside with 50% humidity. If you live in the Cincinnati tri-state area, this will not take a whole bunch of imagination. Now, imagine that you are inside big cement cells with no real air movement. Next, add in some shoveling of stinky bear poo and hauling of cleaning supplies and you get yesterday morning. It was not so much fun. Also, the bears are shedding like crazy and gunking up their water tubs so that we have to drain and refill all of them, which takes FOREVER. Also, we had two volunteers who had never done bears before. Long story short, yesterday morning was a very slow, hot process.
Eventually we did escape the bear oven in time for some lunch. I broke down and stored my lunch and water in Paul's office refrigerator, which I haven't done before because sometimes things like dead mice and rats get put in there before (animal) feeding time. You'd think that someone who shovels bear poo and processes meat could care less, but it still kind of grosses me out. However, it was so hot that I had fears of even my carrots melting, so into the questionable frige my lunch went. At lunch time, my cold water and lunch was divine, and I regretted absolutely nothing.
Of course, after lunch was Rosie time. Rosie was literally bouncing off the walls despite the heat. I think the new volunteers got her all riled up. But she did pause to be photogenic a few times.
After Rosie, we had to process an elk. Paul picked up this elk from an elk farm in Indiana. Apparently it had gotten its antlers stuck in the fence, and in the process of breaking free he tore off not only his antler, but part of his skull as well. The animal was still alive and left to his own devices (with an exposed brain??!) for two weeks before finally being put out of its misery and then donated to Paul. I won't go into details, since it was pretty much the same process as the cow. I did get to use the bone saw again, though...
The next task after the elk was vaccinating Paul's horses. I don't know if I've ever described how crazy his horses are, but to put it shortly, they are definitely not riding horses. Paul often describes them as his big dogs. Well, vaccinating these "big dogs" required a bucket of grains and a bucket of chopped up apples and being surrounded by four horses who were torn between eating the food from your hands or spooking from the vaccinations. Not my favorite of situations, but we all came out of it okay. No harm, no foul, right?
The next chore was easy: cleaning and refilling the raptors' water bowls. Paul asked me to take some photos for him, so I have lots of bird photos for your enjoyment.
Red Tailed Hawk
Great Horned Owl
Barred Owl
Following birds, we went back to the barn. One of the newbies had to leave, but we took the other on a tour of the property. One of the senior volunteers (I won't name names...) overheated the 4x4 and caused it to spew smoke and anti-freeze, which we quickly diluted with water to keep any animals from ingesting it.
After the tour, everybody headed home except for me. I stuck around to help Paul water the wolves and later give a tour. The tour started at 7 PM and had a total of 7 people from 3 different groups in it. I was in charge of driving a cart with two people in it. The tour lasted two hours, which is incredible because most sanctuary tours are short and not incredibly informative. Paul takes the time to talke about the animals in a way that relates specifically to the group he is showing around. For example, there were three children in the group yesterday, and he talked to them as much as he talked to the adults. It was really neat to see him talk about the animals he knows and cares so much about.
By the time the tours was finished, it was 9:15 and time for me to go home. I was too tired to write when I got home, so sorry for the late update. I go out again tomorrow, but it should be a much shorter day. So hopefully I will write again tomorrow!
As you may have noticed, I was unable to post last week. This was because I was not able to go to Red Wolf Sanctuary last week due to an unexpected babysitting engagement. It was probably a good day to miss, considering I would have been repairing fences and shoveling bear poo in sunny 105º F weather. Oddly enough, I was still a little bummed about missing out on my weekly Red Wolf fix.
This week, no babysitting came between me and bear poo. I know that I have already explained poo duty, but I don't think that I have explained what exactly we feed to the bears. The basic ingredients include: peanuts, sunflower seeds, dog food, bear dietary supplement, some form of meat, and raisins. Often time we will also include apricots, carrots, and/or prunes. BUT, the bears' favorite special summertime treat are peaches. They just really love peaches. Paul bought four large crates of peaches, so we treated the bears this morning. This year, peaches are rather pricey due to a late frost that killed off a great deal of the crop (apples were also hit rather hard by the frost), so they have a rather pricey diet this summer. They certainly enjoyed it, though. Peach juice was running from many a bear's mouth.
We were short a volunteer this week, so bears took a little longer than normal. Plus, shedding season just hit full force, so bear hair is EVERYWHERE. It clogs drains, it makes their water tubs disgusting, it mats poo to the floor. In short, it significantly extends the amount of time it takes to clean the pens. Needless to say, after all this hard work I was very ready for my sophisticated PB&J lunch. Rosie was oh-so photogenic today. She's a diva, that's all there is to it. The fact that it was very hot and very inductive of nap attacks also helped add to the photo opportunities. Here are some photos to prove my point:
In other news, Paul has recently rescued a little adolescent red-shouldered hawk that was blown out of its nest in one of the recent storms. So, after Rosie time, we went and fed the hawk. Before I go into details about what exactly we fed, I want to mention that Paul has every intention of releasing this hawk back into the wild. This means that it has to know how and what to hunt. So when I tell you that we fed the hawk live brown mice for its lunch, hopefully you will not be too appalled. Even if you are a little upset about it, at least you know why it is necessary.
Then it was off to the cat barn to feed frozen guinea pigs. Due to the scorching heat, all of the non-frozen meat we have been feeding to the cats has been turning to writhing maggot masses within 24 hours. To combat the heat and the maggots, Paul decided to feed frozen guinea pigs. The cats seem to really like them and it has helped a great deal with the smell, flies, mess, and maggots. Yuma took her frozen treat outside to enjoy in the sun!
Due to the heat, water runs low very quickly for the animals. This means that today we had to set forth in the water 4x4 and refill water bowls for every coyote and wolf and cat on the premises. One of the male wolves was feeling very friendly today and Paul allowed the other volunteer and I to come in and greet him. It is always amazing to meet such an intrinsically wild animal like the wolf. On the way home, Paul spotted this monster:
The other volunteer had one last duty left for the day by the time 3 rolled around. We had to collect grasshoppers to feed to the Red-Shouldered hawk. This is not simple task. Armed with a butterfly net and a PB jar, we managed to capture four of them. I was in charge of the PB jar. I was very importantly watching Justin (the other volunteer), run around while wildly swinging a butterfly net. Our technique was so bad that I think it's pretty safe to say we caught the four slowest, dumbest grasshoppers out there. In fact, I'm kind of surprised that Natural Selection didn't get to them before we did. Lucky for us, I suppose.
