Totally starting to feel more competent at the center! YAY! I feel that I no longer have to ask Jo or any of the staff a hundred times to repeat their request or walk me through everything step by step. My biggest fear is doing an intake exam by myself (which I've been doing some of, but mostly with supervision from one of the staff) since I'm scared I'm going to overlook something really important. Oftentimes the smallest, most innocent-looking cuts or scrapes can indicate whether an animal is actually in terrible shape and needs intense medical treatment, or even to be put to sleep. I'm picking up more of the medical lingo every day, although my knowledge of anatomy is still very basic. (For all of you who are impressed by how much animal stuff I know, you would be blown away by the people here).
Personal news: finally have a car! When my parents were out visiting a few weeks ago we picked up a rental car for me from Rent-A-Wreck. True to the name of the company, the car isn't exactly a beauty, (it's a 2003ish, dark green Toyota Echo), but it serves to get me from point A to point B in one piece and prevents me from potentially being run over by walking home in the dark. I feel a lot more independent having my own transportation, and it's nice to know that if i ever needed to just get away and go for a drive or something, I now have the means to do it.
I also went surfing in CA for the first time! I've only been once before, in Costa Rica, and I took a lesson managed to stand up by the end, which was satisfying. This time I didn't have someone teaching me - I went with my roommate and one of the new externs. None of us had much experience, so we were a bit out of our element, but we had fun nevertheless. Unfortunately the waves weren't the best. There were some big ones but there were tons of surfers at that specific beach that day, so there was never enough room for everyone. The best surfers would jump on the waves and edge everyone else out. I didn't observe it personally, but I've heard that sometimes they will physically push people out of a wave :P I did catch one good wave, although I didn't manage to quite stand up. I'm hoping to go at least one more time before I leave (I have to rent a surf board/wetsuit and I'm kinda cheap so sadly it can't become a full-time hobby).
Anywho, I'll just run through some of the big animal related news, since I know that's what people really care about ;)
- we got two adorable baby possums in the other day. I'd never seen a baby possum before and it's incredible how cute they are. Every time we would take them out to try and feed them they would attempt to scare us by hissing, which was just too adorable to be scary :P sorry little guys, maybe one day when you're bigger.
- On Friday when I walked down to the skunk enclosure to give the skunks their PM diets, I opened up the gate and saw skunks everywhere. Someone had forgotten to lock one of the inner doors to the enclosures themselves (luckily there's a second outer locked door so they couldn't actually escape into the outdoors), and they had all wandered out. Thankfully they were all very hungry so I placed their food inside the fences and they all walked back in. Phew. I thought the trouble was over, but later when I went down to feed other animals I happened to chance upon a lone young skunk wandering around outside the other enclosures. I had a radio with me so I called up to the center and told them that we had a "skunk problem." Immediate Dr. Tom, the in-residence vet, came running down the hill, armed with googles and heavy gloves. There was no way to know if this was actually one of our skunks or a wild one that had wandered in, so we needed to be careful when handling it. Dr. Tom explained that if it was a newcomer, the skunks in the enclosures would immediately know and would attack the intruder. It turned out that it was indeed an escaped skunk. Although we were watching the escapee return to his friends and we happened to notice another skunk walking along the outside of the fence line. Oh boy, here we go again. (Dr. Tom totally got sprayed during the recapture btw).
- We also have two new deer - one is a tiny baby that we kept by himself for a few days and had to hand feed. Deer are extremely susceptible to imprinting so every time we entered the stall with him we would have to wear the "deer suit," which consists of a heavy piece of fabric that you wear a bit like a poncho that covers your whole body. Then on top of that we wear a hood that looks like a weird version of a fencing helmet. Basically a pillow case with a mesh front over your face. It's extremely hot and annoying to wear. One less desirable task that goes with bottle-feeding babies is that you often have to "stimulate" them after they eat, which means make them urinate/defecate, since they can't do it themselves. In the wild I believe the mothers will perform this task until the babies are old enough.
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| Baby Poorwill (related to whippoorwills) |
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| Great camouflage: they totally look like leaves! |
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| Collage of a few of the baby birds we have (clockwise: poorwill, quail, swift) |
We also have baby skunks! There was a group of 5 babies that had been found alone (their mother had most likely been killed). We had to bottle feed for a few days until they learned to eat on their own. Below is a video of one of the babies reacting to a "scary" monster that just entered his territory:
Recently those babies got big enough to get moved to RVU with the other young skunks, however, we have the newest resident baby - a youngster that is only a few weeks old! She was found by herself as well, although it is possible that she was left behind by her family as she is extremely tiny and was most likely the runt of the litter. However, we find her absolutely delightful and there's a tiny, guilty, part of me that hopes she imprints so that she'll have to stay with us forever. (I go a little photo crazy whenever she's around, so i have a sizable album of pictures of her. I call her Delilah, not sure why; she just looks like a DelilahPhone pics come out kinda crappy, so one day I plan on bringing my real camera to the center to get some pics. ).
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| She loves to grasp the bottle in her paws! So cute! |
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| her adorable baby tail! |
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| Kara and I went to a party at one of the volunteers's houses and met his African Grey Parrot, "Arthur." |
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| Found this upstairs in the kitchen of the center. Thought it was fitting :) |
The center's going to become much quieter soon, the interns from session 2 are going to be leaving in the next couple of weeks (one this week, one next week and my roommate the week after that). It's going to be sad and very strange without them and I imagine that the work load is going to coincidentally increase significantly. There are only 4 interns total for session 3 (my official session), so it'll be a much smaller group. Once my roommate leaves, I'll be living alone at the guest house, so if anyone's visiting Los Angeles in August, call me up, I'll have an extra bed!
Till next time, peace, love and skunks.
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