Week 62: Davis/The Death of a Sea Lion

Davis week happened, and it was a blast! I had a ton of cool experiences which I will share in small snap-shots for each day and as for actual pictures, I will put a few out here and there so there is more pretty things to look at in the future!:
Sunday: Sat on a charter bus...FOR 8.5 HOURS!! So that sucked, but it was worth it when we got to Wild Things, an outreach company that serves the bay area (that's places around San Francisco for all you non-Californians). It's run by two of our graduates and they were so welcoming and they really do it right for outreach. The kids up there are lucky to have access to them! Then we got to our hotel and relaxed.
Monday: Davis! We went to UC-Davis and saw their super amazing veterinary teaching hospital facility. They have the capacity to necropsy an elephant! All their other facilities were really amazing and very state of the art. The capacities they have to care for large animals (i.e. horses) is really great and it was cool to see a few things in action. They also do a little bit towards helping people learn exotic medicine too. Then we went out and checked out their primate research center. That was really interesting, but really, just a lot of monkeys in cages. That's all. And I couldn't take any pictures at either of these facilities all day, so no pics from here...
Tuesday: We started out at Guide Dogs for the Blind. It is truly a gorgeous facility. We saw some cute puppies! They are really cool and they are probably the best at what they do, which is providing guide dogs to the blind at no cost, if you couldn't figure that out. After that we went to the San Francisco zoo and had an interesting talk from their curator of mammals (a graduate) about all their recent incidents. It was enlightening.
Wednesday: Discovery Kingdom! This is a Six Flags park once known as Marine World. In addition to the few rides and coasters, it has a mini-zoo/marine mammal park. We toured all the different stadiums and facilities to see all they do. It started off with the dolphins, then we moved to the sea lions (they also have harbor seals and otters), we also saw the walrus (they are the ones featured in the movie "50 First Dates"). We broke for lunch, and on that break we discovered that Schmoo II, our sea lion of I don't know how many years, passed on. It was hard to hear since we couldn't be there, but it was also good to know. She was crazy old and had many problems from that age. After much tears and mourning, we went back to the park to see the rest they had to offer. We started at elephants, then went to their wildlife theatre (wide variety of cool things), after that we saw the tigers (hooray for free contact training!), saw the bird show, then finished up with the killer whale! That was really cool and we all got a group shot (it's on staff's camera...hope I can get it somehow) with the whale.
Thursday: We checked out of our hotel and headed down the coast. We found the Marine Mammal Center. They have a beautiful new building and housings for their animals. All they do is rescue/rehab/release marine mammals. Currently the sea lions are having a rough time of it, so they had a lot of those, and one northern fur seal. They also deal with harbor seals and elephant seals and are currently fund raising for their cetacean facilities! It was a great tour and then it got kind of boring as we explored the depths of their pool filtration... But a really awesome organization and one people should totally support! After that we traveled down to the Moss Landing Marine Mammal research center. There they have six sea lions they train and pretty much run a small version of what we do at EATM. The animals there are amazingly well behaved and the training demos they did for us were very helpful and I think everyone learned a lot in those few hours there. After that we left for the new hotel in Monterey and then had a cool group dinner at a pub on cannery row.
Friday: Last day! We checked out the fabulous Monterey Bay Aquarium and got some talks from the otter keepers and the vet. Seeing the white shark and the fantastic jelly fish exhibit was really great! I highly reccommend it if you are in the area! After that we headed on home and it was all over (only a 5 hour trip this time...).

Week 61: Packing Up

This week was all just a crazy mixed up jumble. All of us were running around with our heads cut off trying to find all the people we needed to see to explain care taking on our animals. We unveiled the script for spring spectatular to the class and it seems to be a hit with most everyone (except for the people who don't really care about anything anyways)! Had a zoo day at LA again and I did the tiger string. It was really fun and strangely my favorite animal to work around there was the mountain tapirs, not any of the big cats (although those baby snow leopards are freaking adorable!!). We went in to clean around them and feed them and they are very curious and friendly. It was really cool and they could easily entertain me for hours if I had time to sit around. Next week is Davis, and I'll take lots of cool pics so you can see some of the cool things that I'll be seeing!

Week 60: New Additions!

All the Davis trip things are coming together: we filled out permission slips (I know, it seems silly, but it's more of a liability waiver I think) and made hotel reservations and arranged for our roomies! Everyone is very amped up and excited. We also got the first year care taker assignments so we've started training them. These assignments also kick up the drama dust pile since now we have more gossip circulating about who cares about what and all the usual BS. As a sweet change of pace from all the death around here, we've got some new animals! We got Harold the guinea pig on Thursday and we will soon be having Peggy, a 3-legged opossum coming into the collection. And, best of all, I'm going to be a trainer on Peggy! I'm really excited and my co-trainers are my good friends, so it should be lots of fun and I'll post her cute pics when she gets here. I think that's the gist of the week, so hard to keep things straight any more, and as you've noticed, I've been slacking on getting posts made too timely.

Week 59: Rare Kitty Close Up

Had a pretty good week! Things were functioning as normal. Mau was taken to a vet to get her eye checked out. Apparently her eye lid/lashes are curling inwards, irritating her eye. Might have to fix this surgically... Sadly, this trip seems to have destroyed her trust in us and set something off in her brains. She has suddenly stopped coming out of the hoofstock area again, so she's out of shows until we can fix that. On the up side, Bwana seems to be trusting again and that's all back on track. Have my mid-term for those behaviors next week!
On Thursday, I had a Santa Barbara zoo day. It was great! I worked the cat string. They have lots of really rare and cool cats and one of the most rare, an Amur leopard (there's only like, 30 left in the wild!!), was knocked-down to get a look at him, so I got to mess with him (petting, exploring) and help with that procedure!
The best news of all came on Friday: the Davis trip is on and approved! It was in limbo for a while, but now it's all approved and we are taking a sweet charter bus that is being paid for, so it's cheaper than usual! Everyone is releived and excited to know that's going to happen now. Sorry I don't have any sweet pics for you this week...