Busy Busy Busy

Hello again

Today was a very busy day at Red Wolf. It was so busy that I didn't even have time to sit down with Rosie...so now you know I mean some serious work was getting done.

I am still getting used to working on Saturdays instead of Tuesdays. Bear cages don't get a full clean on Saturdays, which is very nice. Instead, this morning started with cleaning Yuma's (the Puma) indoor/outdoor enclosure. Bozeman the bobcat passed away during the winter while I was at school, and it is very sad to go into the cat barn and not hear his weird chuffing meow and see him rubbing against the door for some scratching. But it is what it is. So Yuma is the only cat in the cat barn now, but she still manages to make enough of a mess to keep us busy. I had the honor of pooper scooper duty, and filled a 50-lb feed bag with poop ranging from the very fresh to the very petrified. It was not the most fun I ever had, but her outdoor enclosure looked (and smelled) so much better after. Then I went back to the indoor enclosure to help the other volunteer finish up. This involved cleaning up a lot of...icky stuff...that I will spare you the description of. Long and disgusting story short, in the summer, carnivore food goes bad VERY quickly. But we prevailed with our trusty Dawn and Clorox.

After taking care of Yuma's stinky situation, we returned to home base. We had to do some cleaning because the sanctuary has gotten 5 new baby birds (kestrels) in the last WEEK. This is on top of the 3 baby screech owls, one great horned owl, and hawk that have come in the the last MONTH. This means lots of poopy grimy astroturf and cages. So we cleaned those up, then made up bear food. We then went to feed said food to the bears. While we were at it we decided to scoop some bear poop as well. We know how to have a good time.

We returned again to the main barn. The other volunteer, who has far more bird experience than me,  tackled cleaning up Ziggy's (one of the new injured hawks) cage as well as feeding the 3 youngest Kestrels. I have a really cool video of the babies being fed, but YouTube said it would take 100 minutes to upload and I am hoping to go to bed in 15. So I will put it up tomorrow. I, on the other hand, took care of completely cleaning the baby foxes enclosure. It is an indoor enclosure for now, until the Sanctuary can gather enough funds and manpower to build a new fox enclosure. It is also not very large, maybe twice the size of your average dog kennel. This means a very concentrated fox/fox pee smell. I was convinced that I burned my nasal passages while cleaning out the cage. Also, I was divebombed by a panicked baby fox. Let me explain- I was scooping out the old bedding and replacing it with new (nice-smelling bedding) while moving around the various toys and tunnels (some still with foxes in them) and generally scaring the poor guys half to death. One, whom I have decided to name Crazy Tom, decided to try climbing up the side of the cage. He lost his grip. And fell on my head. We were both rather startled. But other than that, the cage cleaning was quite successful. And even though I don't feel like uploading the video of the kestrels, I will put some photos up. As you can probably tell, they are projectile poopers. I was not aware that baby birds could poop so violently. You had to be ready to avoid enemy fire if they turned their backends towards you...Luckily neither my camera nor I were caught in the crossfire.

 The older kestrels apparently outgrew their projectile pooping stage and moved onto the "play dead" defense mechanism. They do it quite convincingly:

And despite our little mishap during cleaning, one of the baby foxes let me photograph him (/her?). I still can't really tell the 5 babies apart, although this one's boldness leads me to think that it may be Crazy Tom...

And before lunch, we (and by we I mean the other volunteer) moved Ziggy the hawk to a clean cage!

After lunch, we watered the wolves and foxes and coyotes and raptors. It's starting to get hot, so this will become a pretty common occurrence I think. Then we prepared one of the back rooms of the bear barn to become a new flight room for the two older kestrels, complete with a large baby pool o' mice. Despite the sound of mice rustling around in the hay, the kestrels decided to continue to play dead (Yes, we are sure the are playing dead and not actually dead). And that was it for the day. Not too much exciting, although I don't think many people can say they have been dive-bombed by a fox. Hopefully I will remember to post that video of the baby kestrels being fed, but for now I am too tired to do that.