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! ;-)