Hours Covered: 140-150
The days have been pretty repetitive lately. I come in and I feed the inside fawns, clean them and put them in the small outside pen. Then I feed and make sure the fawns outside are clean too. I also let the outside fawns into the bigger half of the pen. We keep them locked in the smaller part at night so that they don’t freak out and injure themselves on the fence. After the fawns are all done, I go help in isolation and the raccoon rom with whatever still needs to be done. We still have dozens of raccoons inside, so feeding and cleaning takes a long time. The four baby raccoons that were in the incubator have gotten big enough that they are not out of the incubator and in a carrier. Eventually once they are vaccinated they will move into the raccoon room. These four raccoons are my favorite by far. They are easy to handle and always drink all of their formula. They are gaining weight fast. Speaking of weights, I work on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays, and the raccoons are weighed on Wednesdays and Saturdays. However, when I was making up a shift from when I was sick, I came in on a Wednesday. Weigh days are hectic. In addition to cleaning and feeding, each raccoon needs to be weighed. The best way to do it is to weigh a pillowcase, zero out the scale, and then put the raccoon in the pillowcase and weigh them. I’ve used a similar technique to weigh birds and rabbits. I learned the hard way that Blue Jays are aggressive birds. I thought “oh small bird, I’ll just gently grab it like I do with the rabbits.” But the second I reached into the reptarium, the Blue Jay bit me. After that, I switched to used a pillow case and holding it like you would a dog poop bag and then turning it inside out once I have a hold of the bird. I also learned that some birds have this issue where they curl their foot up and it gets stuck that way. When we see it starting to happen, the staff uses bandages to flatten the foot and keep it that way.
In other animal news, we have 5 cages of raccoons now. There aren’t many outside total, but they are being separated by county, so that is why there are more cages than probably needed. Some of the raccoons are too curious for their own good. The work boots I wear to the center have a buckle on the back similar to the clip ones on backpacks. There is one raccoon in a cage of two that always runs up and starts playing with it when I am not looking or bent over scooping poop. I have to actually stomp my feed to get him to leave me alone. I feel bad startling him, but it is better than letting him get to comfortable with humans.
In relation to the bird foot issue, I never found out why it happens. But thinking back to Comparative Animal Behavior, I wonder if it is a genetic thing, or an environmental thing. For example, because we see it when we are trying to rehabilitate them, is it related to stress? It could just be a muscle issue that happens automatically, but I would be interested to learn more. I have been running out of things to connect to my courses and coursework, but I am finding out a lot of things that I want to learn more about. I’m very interested in how some of these animals’ behaviors are affected by their disease or injury. For example, we had a great horned owl brought in with west nile virus. It was much more docile than the education great horned owl we have. Is it merely because the animal feels ill that the behavior changes, or does the virus affect the behaviors directly?
Everything has been going great at my internship. The other interns and I get along great and working together with people who are just as interested in animals as you are is so much fun. The staff is so supportive and amazing, they are never condescending to us for not knowing something. In fact, I’m pretty sure Jane really loves teaching us as part of her job supervising our interns. Recently, she taught us why goose meat is a red meat and chicken is not. It is because geese fly, and therefore need greater blood flow in their body than chickens do. It’s little facts like these that are just really fun to hear about.
