Last night I went to see The Cove, a documentary about dolphin slaughter in Japan. I had an entire box of Kleenex with me, many of which I ended up using, but not because of the movie.
I walked in and my friend Mark, who owns the theater, said, “Oooh, you’re a vet type, come look at this.”
He took me outside to a little drainage ditch and shined a flashlight into the 6″ wide PVC pipe that emptied into the ditch. The entire opening was blocked by a raccoon head.
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Sep 25, 2009 | | Animal Tales, Wildlife
That is my hand, inside a giraffe’s mouth at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs.
HOW COOL IS THAT? Read the rest of this entry »
Mar 22, 2009 | | Wildlife
I volunteer once a week at a wildlife sanctuary, Greenwood Wildlife. It’s baby bird season, which means that a whole lotta baby birds need care and feeding from sunup to sundown. My job consists of feeding baby birds with a syringe.
The trouble with birds is that there is an opening into the trachea (the glottis), at the base of the tongue. If the bird happens to have its glottis open when something lands in that spot in its mouth, that something goes straight into their lungs. So, obviously, one doesn’t want to squirt a syringe full of food right onto their glottis, or they will aspirate it and keel over. One has to shove the syringe further back into the throat so as to avoid the glottis.
Finches, being the little bitty birds that they are, are even littler and bittier when they are babies. And a syringe tip is just about as big as their mouth is. This makes it a little tough to get the syringe past the glottis, so you just try the best you can. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work.
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Jul 03, 2008 | | Animal Tales, Wildlife
I almost ran over a Wyoming ground squirrel on the way home for lunch yesterday. This is nothing new, not because I’m a lousy driver, but because they are everywhere. And since it’s spring, half of them are babies, too young to realize that cars can smoosh them. To make matters worse, they’re cannibalistic, and will feast on their dead in the middle of the road. They also seem to have an unholy desire to fling themselves in front of oncoming tires at the last possible second. Fortunately, I think I’ve only managed to smash one of them in the fourteen years I’ve lived here.
I kind of like the little guys, despite the fact that they’re almost universally reviled. I’ve never really figured out why this is… I guess they’ve been known to eat garden plants, and their burrowing will mess up a fancy manicured lawn. I don’t plant tasty garden plants (precisely because they’ll get eaten), and my lawn is pretty well wild. So the squirrels and I get along just fine. Read the rest of this entry »
Jun 07, 2008 | | Wildlife
