Seal Pictures! :-D

I've finally uploaded some seal pictures!! They're pretty adorable:

This is Coho. She was a premature pup, but is doing well. She's lost her lanugo and has real fur now. She's pretty cute.

This is O'o. I had a harder time getting a good picture of him because a) he kept moving around and b) he's dark so the contrast between his fur and his face isn't as high as with Coho. He's older, and was a full-term pup that we got because he has an injury on his left eyelid. I got to tube him today to give him electrolytes!! :-D He was really good about it. Coho has to be held from the side while she's tubed, but O'o will accept the tube if you just cup his chin and push the tube in from the front. I also gave him his 2 pm bath. He's getting a little nippy now, as I experienced when I had to spray his umbilical cord with betadine. He managed to nip at the back of my arm, but he didn't actually bite down. He just ended up with a little bit of the coat we have to wear to do anything with the seals (to protect our clothes from mess, and also to help prevent cross-contamination between seals).

It's gotten really warm the past few days. Of course, it's only in the mid-70s, but I was just getting adjusted to temperatures in the upper 60s!! Now it feels unbearably hot in the indoor animal care areas, as well as in parts of the intern housing. It doesn't help that there are heat lamps and heating pads in most of the rooms in the animal care building, and there's no AC. I'm pretty sure there's actually no AC in the intern housing, either! (I might feel a bit cooler if I wasn't sitting in front of a computer, too... ^_~)

Another really exciting thing happened today: I got some yarn! Yesterday, I went with Tristen, one of the staff members, to pick up an injured crow fledgling that was found by staff at a hotel in Friday Harbor. (The poor thing had a really badly broken leg and had to be euthanized.) Along with the crow, they donated a couple boxes of linens that they couldn't use any more because of minor stains, as well as things that people left behind (we've found some shirts). Near the bottom of one box was several skeins of yarn!! I checked with the staff, and they told me that Wolf Hollow doesn't have any real use for yarn, so I happily took it off their hands! :-D

So, two really big exciting things happened today (getting to tube and bathe a seal, and finding yarn). Unfortunately, there was a really sad thing as well. The black swift, which is a really cool bird, and has been here since before I came, died today. It seemed like it was doing well; it was eating and starting to get stronger flight muscles. The most likely cause, according to Tristen, is a severe vitamin deficiency because we can't imitate its natural diet of hundreds or thousands of different types of bugs very well. We'd been feeding it mealworms (sprinkled with calcium powder) for a long time, then switched it to crickets (because the mealworms apparently have very tough exoskeletons).

Yesterday evening, during the second part of my split shift, was also very exciting. I went with Laura, another intern, to pick up a dead deer (normally we try to pick up freshly dead deer that we can butcher to feed to various carnivores, or else we might pick up things blocking roads and driveways and set them far away from most things on our property so that it's safer for vultures and eagles and other carrion-eaters to pick at them). This deer was extremely dead, very bloated and covered with flies and fly eggs. It was pretty rank and disgusting. (On the bright side, the guy who called us (it was in his backyard) gave us a donation!) When we got back, we had to feed animals, including a pair of hatchling birds (pink and ugly and unable to hold their own heads up. They're a pain. Or it, rather, since one died.), and Laura had to pick up a bird that was being sent to us on the ferry. While she was gone, a guy brought in 9 (yes, nine) mallard ducklings that he found running along a main road without any parent in sight. So I had to fill out some paperwork and get them all set up in a tub with food and water for the night, as well as prep food for several animals, while trying to feed hatchlings every 15 minutes, a few nestlings every 30 minutes, and about 8 other birds on the hour. We also had an interesting time trying to prepare food for a couple fawns that are having intestinal issues. One is supposed to get a Gas-X tab in her food. Except we couldn't find the Gas-X. We spent over 15 minutes searching for Gas-X, until we decided that it must have all been used. It was probably the most hectic time I've had to work since I've been here. I was infinitely glad when my shift was over!! We were running around doing so much, neither of us even got a chance to eat dinner until after everything was done around 8:45!!

I think I'm about ready to get away from this computer and (hopefully) into a cooler, breezier spot - right in front of the open door to the deck! ;-)

We've got Seals!

We've finally got some seals in!! We've actually got two so far - one came in today and one came in a couple days ago. I haven't been able to go in and take pictures yet, though, but there will be some forthcoming!! The first one to come in was a premature pup, a female that we named Coho. All the seal pups get named following a certain theme; this year's is Threatened and Endangered Vertebrates found in the US. Premature pups get named specifically after fish, and full-term pups can be named for any other vertebrate (one option is the "Shenandoah Salamander", but my personal favorite right now is "Moorhen"). The pup that came in today was full-term, so his name is now O'o (which I think is a type of bird, possibly from Hawaii).

One thing that continues to amaze me is the length of daylight here. Yesterday being the summer solstice and longest day of the year, it didn't get fully dark until close to 10:30, and the sun comes up really early. I've felt disoriented multiple times, waking up to full daylight and realizing it's only 4:30 am - and my room faces west!

On my second day off last week, I biked over to English Camp, a historical park on the west side of the island. It's counterpart, American Camp, is on the southeast tip of the island. The two sites were actual naval bases in the mid-1800s, after (or during?) the "Pig War". An American on the island shot a pig in his garden; the pig turned out to be property of the Hudson Bay Trading Company, and they called on the British Navy to solve the problem. American troops got called up to defend the island as American property, but no real fighting ever occurred. Both sides basically kept their bases on opposite sides of the island while the issue of who "owned" which parts of the "Oregon Territory" (which stretched up into British Colombia, and including all of the San Juan Islands) was worked out between Britain and America.

We had a turkey vulture come in from Lopez Island yesterday. Unfortunately, his wing was broken too badly for him to be rehabilitated, so he had to be euthanized. They took an x-ray of his wing anyway - it was crazy! He'd obviously broken it previously, both the radius and ulna (that's the equivalent of our forearm, for those who aren't up on anatomy), and it had started healing, except the bones hadn't gotten back to the proper placement. You can see the calcium deposit in the x-ray - it's the bright solid-looking spot in the middle of the bones. (The x-ray is of his right wing, for reference.) Some of the staff think he may be the same vulture people on Lopez have called about at least twice before in the past couple months. With the previous calls, however, by the time a volunteer on Lopez got to the scene, the vulture was nowhere to be found. Apparently he was pretty emaciated, so it could be that this time he was just too weak to get away when people approached him. (I actually took that phone call - I could hear the guy telling his son to put the bird in a dog crate! We don't generally ask callers to catch animals for us, especially potentially dangerous ones - leave that to the volunteers! ;-) But these guys obviously felt up to the challenge, so more power to them!)

Hopefully my next post will include seal pictures... :-D

First Week Over...

My first week of rehabbing animals is done! I've got Tuesdays (today) and Wednesdays off to just do whatever. Today I went into Friday Harbor to send some letters and pick up supplies. I walked around "downtown" for a while - the town is absolutely TINY!! There's a movie theater - which only plays 3 movies at a time. And lots of souvenir stores selling kitschy little things that are rather overpriced and not my taste at all, of course. X-D

The only problem is that I had to make two trips to get everything I needed/wanted from the grocery store (or, as it's called here, the Market) on one of the center's "intern" bikes. Which wouldn't be too bad, except that it's a tad too tall for me (and a "guy" frame, which makes it worse) and the seat is really hard. So I'm pretty sore from riding on that thing for at least 16 miles (it's about 4 to town). On the bright side, the scenery is really nice. San Juan Island is very bucolic, and there were some amazing views on the ride.

I did manage to find a spot in the intern housing that gets a patchy phone signal; it'll be decent for a while, then suddenly completely drop out. Unfortunately, this means I'll have to wait until I can get into town (or somewhere NOT in the middle of a valley, which Wolf Hollow is) to call people back home.

And now to talk about the really good stuff - the work! So far, it's been a little overwhelming
trying to learn everything and adjust, but it's been really cool, too. I've spent a lot of time preparing food, feeding, and cleaning up after the animals. There are some really neat patients right now. We've got tons (or it seems that way!) of birds; some are adults that just need "supportive care" until we know they're ready to be released, but we also have nestlings that would never survive without help. Some of the young birds get fed every half hour, which gets a little annoying after a while, if you're the person doing every feeding. ("I just fed these birds and I have to do it again?!") We've got three starling nestlings right now (or at least they could be starlings), and they're pretty ugly. But the sparrow is cute, at least to me.

Two of the starlings - see how unattractive?

Especially when they gape for their food - their mouths are humongous!

Notice how cute this guy is. (Or at least try to imagine. He was hopping around so much I couldn't get a good picture! But he has these adorable little fluffs of feathers on his head reminiscent of Einstein.)

We've also got six fawns, at the moment, four of which are doing wonderfully, but two aren't doing so well. There's also a baby squirrel, two goslings (one is smallish and still very baby-cute, but the other is in kind of an awkward phase between baby-cute and adult-handsome), three ducklings (a hooded merganser, a wood duck, and a mallard, which are all in the same tub to provide a social grouping for them), an adult (?) mallard, three (at least essentially) grown barn owls and one younger one that doesn't have all its feathers yet, a bald eagle with a broken shoulder, an adult cottontail and two infants, two young river otters, 5 young opossums, and 7 young raccoons. I think that's basically it, apart from all the songbirds.

We got a fox kit in the first or second day I was here - she was pretty adorable, but understandably frightened. You can see her head in the picture, during her initial physical exam. She'd been trapped by a person who said that if he saw her again, he'd kill her (to protect the game birds he raises), so the decision was made to try and raise her to be released in the fall. Unfortunately, she ended up dying a few days later. :'-(

One of the really great things about Wolf Hollow is the chance to work with raccoons. There hasn't been a case of a raccoon acting as a rabies vector species (only bats have been found carrying rabies) in this area, so interns can actually handle the raccoons. We still have to take special precautions, though, because of a certain worm they naturally have in their gut that can infect humans. Baby raccoons look pretty cute. Once they get to a certain age, however, they apparently all become pure evil, and ours are just getting to that age. They're very growly and will gladly bite or scratch you, if you let them. I was transferring 5 of the coons to an outdoor tub for the day, and the first one I picked up decided he did not like it one bit! He was the squirmiest thing I think I've ever tried to hold on to! He made the worst noises, as though I were torturing him instead of just scruffing him like a mother might do, and tried his best to get either his claws or his teeth into me. Fortunately for me, I didn't have to take him far, I was wearing gloves, and he didn't manage to get me. The lesson: they may look cute, but raccoons beyond a certain age are evil, evil creatures!

The river otters are also really cool, although one of them is way too friendly. I think she may have come from a different rehab center (she got here before me) because she was imprinting too much on the staff there, which is exactly what you DON'T want to happen. I'm not sure we're having much more success preventing her from imprinting on humans, to be honest! The other problem we're having is that she doesn't seem to understand how to eat from a bowl. She'll eat from a syringe all day, and she's eaten food off a spoon a couple times, but bowls seem to completely baffle her (granted, it's not natural for them to eat from bowls, but a tiny sparrow figured out after a few hours that the food was now coming from a toothpick instead of a beak! You wouldn't think it'd be that difficult for an otter to realize that the dish contains food and yes, she can actually eat it without it coming directly from the hand of a human!). (The picture is Penny, one of the staff members, demonstrating how to use a syringe to give formula to an otter during my first day of training.)

We also constantly get phone calls about potential patients or other animal issues. (My least favorite thing so far has been having to answer the phone!) I got to go out with Penny to pick up a deer carcass from someone's driveway (I think if it had been fresher - it had died the night before, probably after being hit by a car) and, supposedly, pick up a new animal from the airport. (We take in cases from all over the region - other islands, mainland towns close to Anacortes, and even some from other rehab centers.) The plane was running late and we ended up going back to the center because we'd have had to wait too long. The only other call I've gone on was to try and rescue a fawn that got attacked by a fox. It supposedly stood in a pond for 45 minutes (not a good sign) before we got there, but as soon as Sarah R (a staff member) moved towards it, it leaped away. So none of my calls have resulted in a new live animal coming in yet. :-( With seven weeks left, though, I'm pretty sure I'll get something soon!

The really exciting news came tonight - we've finally got a seal pup in!! I can't wait to see it on Thursday - hopefully it will make it that long! (I've heard the seals have a pretty high mortality rate...)

I haven't talked about anywhere close to everything that's happened, but I think this post is long enough already. ;-)

So much to see, so little time...

I'm finally at Wolf Hollow - I officially start my internship tomorrow! Fortunately, they have a computer, so updating won't be as difficult as I thought it might be.

I had a great time in Seattle, meeting my cousins and seeing the sights. I went all over the city - I visited Pike Place Market, the Seattle Aquarium, the Space Needle, the Woodland Park Zoo, the Olympic Sculpture Park, and the Flight Museum. I got some great pictures, but I don't know if/when I'll be able to post them.

Unfortunately, I was in Seattle for their coldest June on record - on the days they were reaching the new lows! Compared to 100 degree heat, though, I think 55 is rather nice, even if it is gray and damp and drizzly. Luckily, the sun actually came out while I was on the Space Needle, so I got some great pictures there. I managed to get one of Mt. Rainier (who knows if I spelled that right!) in the distance; there were clouds around it, but you could see the top poking through, all covered with snow.

I also think I saw a seal on my ferry ride over to San Juan Island, but I'm not 100% sure. I didn't get my camera out in time to take a picture, plus only part of its head was out of the water.

On the whole, Seattle seemed like a very nice city, apart from being so dreary while I was there. (Though supposedly I just got to experience the typical winter weather.) It seemed very dog-friendly, and the transit system (once I actually found my way to the bus stop!) worked really well.

There are currently 3 other interns at Wolf Hollow with me; they seem pretty cool, even though I haven't really gotten to know them since I've only been here a couple hours.

Hopefully there'll be some great pictures with my next entry!

So Close!!

Only a few more days until I leave!

Am I ready? Not really. X-D But, I'm getting there. Slowly.

I'll try to post on this blog as often as possible - probably about once a week, as I'll probably only have a couple days each week when I'll be able to get into town and onto a computer. Feel free to leave comments on posts, or send me an email at klgleaso@ncsu.edu. Since I'll be there for about 8 weeks, you can also send me regular mail at Wolf Hollow: Wolf Hollow WRC, 284 Boyce Rd, Friday Harbor, WA 98250. (Obviously, you should make sure my name is on it as well. ;-D) If you do send me snail mail, make sure it'll arrive before I leave the center on August 6.

My next post should be from WASHINGTON!! :-D