If you don't get the blog title's reference from Toy Story, please please go educate yourself and watch that movie. It, like all other Disney movies, is integral to my being and therefore a thorough understanding of these movies is key to understanding the inner workings of my brain.
ANYWAYS. My photos today are almost exclusively comprised of baby wolves and baby deer. Not together, of course. That would be silly. The morning started out with going to feed Wallace (the baby deer that had arrived when I last visited the sanctuary) and his new adopted sister Joey. We feed them goat's milk replacer, which they seem to enjoy quite a bit. They were both little piggies, but I only got good pictures of Joey because Wallace was being too wiggly to get any respectably non-blurry photos.
It is a little strange to be rehabilitating these little guys, considering how often we are butchering and feeding out the bigger versions. At home, deer are nuisances that eat our flowers and drive our dogs nuts. But these two little guys have names and personalities and are completely different from the road-killed and/or annoying bigger versions. I am not exactly sure what we plan to do with them once they become big deer that are not afraid of humans. All I know is that it will not involve feeding them to hungry wolves.
After feeding the little piggies disguised as deer, we went off for some quality wolf pup time. Most of my photos turned out similar to the one below - blurry and full of crazed-looking wolf pups gnawing on some part of my body.
The best photos were the ones I managed to snap either A) when they were sleeping, or B) intrigued by something outside the pen.
I believe the wolf pups are about 10 weeks old, and they have doubled in size since I last saw them two weeks ago. They go from super crazy energetic to passed out in 3 seconds flat. And they really, really like shoes/shoelaces and tend to not discriminate between shoe and ankle (HA DO YOU SEE THE CONNECTION? THERE'S A WOLF IN MY BOOT!). But they are pretty much the best lil' ferocious munchkins ever.
After we were sufficiently mauled by ferocious wolves, we went out and cleared one of the old fox pens because its occupant (Bull) died unexpectedly last week. It still had one other occupant, Kit, who spent most of the spring cleaning hiding unhappily in his little den. Fox pens are built such that wire mesh not only covers the sides and tops of the enclosure, but also lines the bottom to prevent the fox from digging out. If you neglect to keep the brush and saplings trimmed, they tend to grow into the mesh and become a tangled mess that is rather hard to extract. So that is what we spend the rest of the morning doing - battling trees and shrubs (YOU MUST BRING US A SHRUBBERY!). We had help from one picky chainsaw and one pair of lobbers that were quite old and literally not the sharpest tool in the shed. But we got it done.
After that, we were famished. We retreated from the heat to grab some lunch and water. Following our brief respite, we ventured out to top off waters and feed the raptors. By the time we finished with all that, it was late in the afternoon and just about time to go home. But not before I snuck one picture of Rosie (which is mandatory every time I go to Red Wolf), despite the fact that she was being unusually unsociable today:
That's all folks! See you next week!
