Essentially,
if you want to skip the next bit, until you see the big bold words ACTUAL
ANIMAL STUFF…you’d probably be saving yourself a bunch of time. This is mostly
vague conjecture.
A few things have been going on, and considering we had a
vet meeting today and new cases were brought up, I’m sure there will be more interesting
animal things to follow this week.
I get the feeling that my writing style is too flowery, hard
to follow, and unnecessary. Being concise isn’t really my way.
I’m scatter-brained.
This is seemingly somewhat irrelevant, but I will get around
to my point eventually…I have been watching a fashion design competition all
evening. Now, any of you who know me are pretty aware that ‘fashion’ per say
isn’t high on my priority list. For me, I merely see clothes as another media
with which to produce art. Anything that I can improve upon by adding a hint of
my own style to it is how I like to roll. I buy thrift shop t-shirts and cut
them up just to see what I can make from them. I sew a lot of things without
patterns. I sew a lot of things to a lot of things. I like to decorate myself
with natural elements, and you can frequently find me in an assortment of
wooden and faux leather jewelry pieces, with flowers strewn in my braid. The previous paragraph is what is known as
a tangent.
Here is the actual
point: I felt that it was pertinent
for me to blog in this moment because I am feeling artsy, as I have just been
watching a creative show that inspired me to create.
There I go again, making things sound so darn complicated.
I may be feeling artsy, but that sure doesn’t mean I am
capable of producing a sound piece of literature at this moment.
I’ve had quite a bit of Dr. Pepper and my hair is getting so
scraggly I fear it will start to dread soon. Okay, puns aside, I’m still really
thirsty, my arm is sore from spending the last hour practicing cool braids on
my hair (I am so odd), and I really really should focus and stop blabbering on
or people will ultimately quit reading my blog if they start to believe this
nonsense is what is generally on it.
Actual animal stuff
And so I finally arrive at the point. I hope you have skipped over
the bit at the top and are just now jumping into the crazy pool of words my
mind is conjuring this evening. This week has been pretty busy/crazy, and most
of what we have accomplished, I have gotten jumbled in my head. These are the
procedures or cases that stick out in my mind for the week.
Baby
Goatie, otherwise known as “Logan”
Well, that little nut finally has a name, but I still continue to
call him Baby goatie or Goatie goat. He likes it, I like it—we’re happy.
Feeding him all glorious 4 times a day is a true joy of mine. He knows me very
well now as his milk bearer, and gets so eager as I approach the stall. Once I
get in there, all nicely suited up, bottle in hand, he goes wild. He’s jumping
up on the log, running up the sides of the walls, bucking and twisting.
Honestly, with his long legs flailing and all the crazy stuff he attempts to
do, he looks like he’s trying to do parkour. And he’s only seven pounds. It’s
too much cuteness to handle. I honestly laughed out loud for about ten minutes
the other day watching him. He still stands on my lap as I bottle feed him, and
he has been gulping that milk like a champ lately. After he finishes his
bottle, he has a most hilarious time rummaging my face for more milk sources.
In fact, I’ve had to get much sterner with him about getting off of me, as
today he jumped up and onto my shoulders, started standing like some ridiculous
scarf Lady Gaga would wear, and munched on my hair. I’m not particularly
interested in raising a goat who will do that crazy stuff in adulthood, so I’ve
had to keep pushing him down off of my face and saying, “No” a lot. Which, I’m
not gonna lie, is also kinda hard to do, because he is so darn cute when he is
using me as a playground for his circus parkour jumping acts. I’m still smitten
with him.
White tail
deer fawns
Hoorah for fresh life! Two new deer twins were born yesterday. One
is female, and the other is a male. The male is teensy weensy. When he stands
beside the other baby deer, he almost looks like ‘a fawn of a fawn’ as one
employee put it. It’s pretty precious. Here’s the sad news though: the mother
of these deer is not doing her job at being a good mom. The tiny male was
walking the fence and bawling all day today, hungry, because she would not let
him nurse. They started bottle feeding them today, in a very similar fashion to
how I feed little Logan goat, but we were a little worried about if they’d
received any milk at all from mom. Essentially, in the first few feedings, the
baby receives antibodies from the mother in the ‘first milk’ known as
colostrum. This colostrum has antibodies in it that protect that baby from
disease, and it also has higher protein content than regular milk. We wanted to
make sure they babies had received the antibodies from their mothers, so we
took a blood sample from each of them. The dear wee mouths bawled as the small
needle went into their jugular. I packaged up the blood in tubes, and took it
back to the vet wing for testing. The blood was spun down in a centrifuge, so
that the red cells went to the bottom of the tube and the serum remained on
top. I removed some of the serum with a pipette and added a chemical to it. The
reaction that occurs with the chemical tells whether the baby has received antibodies
or not, and it is measured by weather the serum clots of doesn’t. For both the
male and female, the serum clotted upon addition of the chemical, indicating
that they had indeed received some of mom’s antibodies. Had they not gotten colostrum,
we would have had to inject them with serum derived from cows that contains the
necessary antibodies.
Prairie
Chicken Pre-shipping
Prairie chickens are the most endangered animal in North America.
They are pretty little birds, but have a hard time successfully breeding, as
well as surviving in the wild. This year at the zoo, we had seven baby prairie
chickens survive, which is apparently a great success compared to some years. Several of our birds are going to be sent to
other zoos or wildlife centers, so we had to perform some necessary tests on
them. It has been made clear to me that prairie chicken catching, blood
drawing, etc. is a very stressful process for these guys, and many will often
die from the stress of capture. This leads to a tough call. What are we to do?
They must be tested before sending, so essentially, we just tried to prepare as
absolutely efficiently as possible, and we tried to complete the necessary
tasks on each with speed. We had to weigh each of them, draw quite a bit of
blood (around 2 mL) for various tests, deworm them, and take a cloacal swab. Each
bird had their own little baggie of supplies and everything we did had to be
recorded. We only had one true scare during the morning. One baby started to
gasp as the needle was inserted into his jugular vein, and the keeper holding
him immediately put him in a cage to let him chill out. As she sat him down,
his tiny head lulled back as if he had passed out, and it was a very scary few
seconds. However, he did manage to get himself roused and started walking again
shortly after. Every other bird did quite well, and even that one recovered
with no further issues. I was so thankful it went smoothly, and was highly
impressed with the efficiency of the staff in the vet department.
Penguin
West Nile Vaccines
Well, this is about the last thing I can talk about this evening.
There were other cool cases this week, but I was not personally there for them
and so do not have a full idea of what happened. Not a terribly exciting event,
but we had to give our penguins vaccines today. All nine birds were caught up
by the bird keepers, finagled into submission by them as well, and I was
frantically drawing up syringes of vaccines as the vet stuck ‘em, injected, and
was ready to move to the next one. It was a quick and easy deal, but it’s still
so much fun. After all, how many people do I know back home who get to go give
shots to penguins at work?
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