The Rain Dance Conspiracy

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).