Wolf Music

Howdy hello,

Later-than-usual post today due to an event hosted at my house...I was in charge of watching children at said event, so that required all of my attention and energy. However, before I had to herd children all evening, I was still able to spend the morning and part of the afternoon at Red Wolf Sanctuary. One of the first things I did this morning was feed the baby deer. Wallace and Joey are getting big and super greedy hungry. They each went through two bottles of milk this morning, and even tried to suckle from poor Justin's man parts, which he found to be rather uncomfortable. Once we were able to convince them that no milk could be produced from that particular piece of anatomy, they found the bottles to be quite satisfactory.

The photo I have above is of Joey. You might be noticing that most of my photos of the baby deer are of Joey. Yes, she is a bit more of a diva than Wallace. But Wallace also has this issue with personal space and as soon as you whip your camera out he sticks his nose right into it. My poor camera can't deal with that sort of invasion of personal space, so most all of my Wallace pictures are blurry deer noses.

Anyways, after dealing with the fawns, I made a beeline to the wolf puppies. I got them howling again, and this time I remembered to record it on my camera...in landscape mode! Here, have some wolf music:

Anyways, the pups got vaccinated today. They didn't even blink during the inoculations. It's funny - I've worked at a vet's office for years and have met 100-lb dogs that cry like a baby when you stick them with that needle. But not these puppies. They're all like, "Dude, my siblings bite wayyyy harder than that wimpy needle."
Also, Paul decided to give them a "chew toy" - AKA a deceased cardinal - and all that remained today were some red feathers and a single bird leg (with little talons still attached) that the pups were quite fond of playing tug-of-war with. Even if it did lead to some awkward sibling situations...

My boots continue to be a source of fascination for them, especially for Crioux. He can just about fit the entire end of my foot in his mouth now, which makes me very thankful that my boots are super heavy duty and protect my feet completely from his sharp little wolf teeth.

It's hard to take photos of these guys, since they are always moving and/or trying to eat my camera/fingers/ears. This is what my typical wolf pup photo turns out looking like:

Yeah, so out of the nearly 400 photos I took today, probably only 20 of so are not blurry and do not have wolf pup butt in them. But sometimes I do get lucky and get some good ones. I ended up with more good photos than usual today because Paul has built a "photo studio" in the barn, complete with a green screen. Now, the green screen is there so that the background can be cropped out and something natural-looking can be photoshopped back in. The volunteers had some creative ideas about what backgrounds would be appropriate. Here is one:

I think Kiowa looks quite at home in a Coral Reef Environment, don't you? I haven't had time to appropriately add in backgrounds to any of the photos I took in the studio, but I'll post the "raw" photos anyways.

Now, these photos give an unfair representation of the pups. In most, they look noble and majestic. In real life, they stumbled and fell and pretty much tumbled their way up and down these rocks and logs. It was quite entertaining to watch.
After the wolf puppies, I had lunch and then went to feed the baby kestrels. This means that A) I had to acquire two male mice from Paul's live stock and B) I had to prepare them for the kestrels. This did not sound too difficult. However, it turns out that the mice know that I am only allowed to pick out male mice and not female mice from the mouse tub. The female mice would lazily stroll by hand as I sat poised and waiting for the elusive male mice to come close enough for me to grab. It took me 15 minutes to catch 2 male mice. Feeling glad that I can buy my food at a grocery store and that I don't have to hunt it (because clearly I'd go hungry), I went about prepping the mice for the kestrels. After the mice were killed, this involved cutting them in to kestrel-sized morsels with scissors that have seen much better days. I would have taken pictures, but kestrels (and most baby birds, for that matter) tend to be projective poopers and I did not want to subject my poor camera to such abuse.
Before leaving, I had to say hello to my Rosie. She was feeling personable today, and she let me scratch her behind the ears for a good long while. And she posed for some photos, of course...

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.