Another day at BTN! We had a lot of people helping out last Saturday which was awesome. That means we can all focus on really cleaning the enclosures. My assignment that day was the backrow birds and to train an intern in the flight cages. Again. Unfortunately that girl called out, so I was only in charge of the backrow birds.
I had 4 cages to do, which isn't much. I prepared their diets: Fruit and wet dog food for the crows, fish for the crane, and fruit, wet dog food, and seeds for the songbirds.
Have I mentioned that I love crows? Because I do love crows. They're so affection and cuddly. The first cage had about 5 fledgling crows. They were loud and hungry, like crows always are. They couldn't wait for me to finish scrubbing down their enclosure and replacing the dirty bedding so that I would feed them. They weren't so interested in the fruit; wet dog food is much more appealing to crows. They happily ate it up while I hand-fed them a little bit. They're so cute!!! Though the adult crow by himself in a hutch wasn't nearly as friendly.
"What to eat first?"
"Can't you just hand-feed me?"
The songbirds were starving too. Or maybe they only act like that. I did a lot of hand-feeding because they still need to learn how to primarily feed themselves. I scrubbed down their enclosure and replaced their water. In the flight cage were blue jays, mockingbirds, mourning doves, and brown thrashers. The doves as adults are very skittish, but most of the other birds were up in my face crying for me to feed them. Silly babies, you have to learn to eat by yourselves!
"Feed me Seymour!"
We had a sandhill crane in the back too. I'm not sure what injury brought it here, but it looked really good when I went to look at it. It was very friendly too! It had no problem coming right up to the door as I approached it. I even had to call Emily over to help me shoo the crane away from the door while I carried in a clean box of water. The day before it was fed birdseed and fruit, which is not what a crane would eat. Their long necks, legs, and beaks are indicative of fishing birds. They move like spears into the water to catch fish. Carissa had run out and bought some fish for the crane, so I threw in some frozen finger mullet and live fish (I forget what kind). The crane was SO HAPPY. It went straight for the live fish. It makes me happy to see animals eating well, especially actively hunting.
Beautiful bird
Yummy!
Afterwards I was done! My side-job was: Produce, so I cleaned out the 4 fridges and threw out bad food. Jason, another veteran volunteer/intern helped me out by loading fresh produce into the fridges. So in turn I helped him with the big cats, Jagger (Bobcat) and Zema (Western Cougar). I prepared their diets and Zema's medicine and shared in cleaning their enclosures. Because of our teamwork we got finished quickly so we socialized and spent some time with Zema. He was in a very friendly mood and began to "meow" and purr when he saw us. He was especially focused on Jason. It was adorable!
What an adorable and dangerous big kitty!
Hopefully BTN will keep getting so much help from lots of people! It's great to see the huge increase in volunteers and interns since I started there over a year ago. And I keep thinking how I'm going to miss the people and animals so much once it's time for me to move away.
Until next week!
The Wild Dimes has Fainted!
A nestling. SO ADORABLE!!!
