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...).
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3 comments:
That was a great update. Can't wait to see some photos. Wish I had the opportunity to see what you saw! BTW, I talked to Betty Robertson about the Denver Zoo and she is going to try to work something out for when you are out here.
Mark
Just catching up...I guess I never read these but once a month...sounds like all is well and the learnin' and edumakatin' is still going on! So, what is "free contact training?"
Free contact means that you and the animal are sharing the same space, as opposed to protected contact where there is a barrier of some type separating you.
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