October

Well, I just realized that it has been over a month since my last update.  I'm terrible, I know.  I have some great stuff to talk about now, though.  The highlight of my October was being able to go out of town twice in the last week and a half.

My friend, Josh, from Cleveland asked me earlier this month if I would be able to go to Six Flags Great Adventure (in New Jersey) with him if I could get flown in.  I said yes and we planned on going to Six Flags on a Saturday.  I would fly in on a Friday and we would get dinner and go to a show in the city.  Well, it turned out that the weather was not going to be very considerate of us - the forecast showed a 90% chance of rain for most of the day.  So, we planned on spending Friday night and all of Saturday in NYC.  I hadn't been to the city since 2003, so it was nice to see it again and to actually be able to relax this time.  Last time, I was visiting with friends from high school and visiting some schools and seeing every possible tourist attraction there was to see in a one day.  I still can't believe Mom and Dad let me go to NYC and Boston alone as a junior in high school!

This is the view from my hotel room.

I flew into Newark, NJ last Friday (the 23rd) and met Josh at his gate.  By the way, I flew first class, bitches!  The seats were quite comfortable and the free drink service was nice, albeit slow.  The flight attendants were slow, so I was only able to fit in three beers in the 2 hour 44 minute flight.  Come on!  Otherwise, the flight was fine.  I had a window seat and I was able to see so much because it was not cloudy until we neared the east coast.  I was kind of confused with what I was supposed to do with the hot towel I was offered.  I casually looked at the other first-classers, who seemed more used to this treatment, before doing exactly what they did.  I still don't get it, though.  Josh and I were greeted by our driver.  Before you ask: yes, he was holding a sign with Josh's last name written on it - just like in the movies! 

We checked into our hotel, the Hilton Garden Inn in Tribeca, and met Josh's boss, Elvis Duran (of the morning show!), for drinks and dinner.  We stopped at two lounges for drinks and ended up at a restaurant in Tribeca called Odeon.  It was a nice dinner, and it was free for me.  I really enjoyed it.  I also got to meet Carolina of the morning show as well.  I felt like a wealthy man enjoying such luxuries all weekend long.  On Saturday, we went to shopping in Soho for the afternoon.  I found the best place in the world to shop for shoes! There were walls and walls of shoes!  I had to buy a pair and, of course, a new pair of jeans!  We had tickets for Billy Elliot on Broadway for the evening, so we planned on eating dinner in the Times Square/Broadway area.  We took the subway up to that area and found a great vegetarian restaurant called Zen Palate.  It was SO GOOD!  I wish I could eat in NYC every day.  So many great places I would love to check out.  Wherever we walked, Josh and I made sure to not look like tourists.  So, whenever we walked the wrong way and needed to turn around, we acted very casual about it and shouted out "Oh, she said she was meeting us at the normal spot over herrrreee..." or something like that.  I'm sure it made us look much better.

The show was fantastic!  We actually were surprised that when we picked up our tickets at will call they said row Orchestra Row AA on them.  For you common folk out there, that means we were sitting in the FRONT ROW!  I had never seen a musical in the front row before.  OMG, you miss out on so much from the upper section!  The facial expressions are crystal clear and it just makes the experience so much better.  We also get to watch the orchestra doing their thing beneath the stage.  The show itself was probably the best musical I have ever seen.  The music was very good and the acting was awesome.  We actually got to experience two actors playing the main character.  At intermission, they announced that the Billy from Act 1 had started to feel ill and that the rest of the show was going to be played by another actor.  There are normally three actors who rotate performances for the main character.  I strongly recommend this musical if it ever comes to town.  The rest of the night, Josh and I checked out some bars in Chelsea and got home at about 4:00 am.  WOW - lol.  We woke up late for our car.  My flight was at 8:30 am and I didn't get out of the hotel until about 7:30, but I ended up making it in time and I got back to Texas at about noon on the 25th.

The staff here had arranged a transfer of a cheetah from here to the National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, Virginia.  They decided to meet halfway, in Nashville, to make the transfer.  Jason and I left the morning of the 28th to make the 11 hour drive.  We drove pretty much non-stop to make it there as quick as possible.  We arrived at the Nashville Zoo at around 8:30 pm and made the transfer.  Just a crate with a cheetah in it being transferred to a second vehicle - no big deal!

Anteaterrr. cool.

Tapir love.

Jason used to work at the Nashville Zoo, so he was able to hook us up with a couple of cool experiences like standing next to and petting an elephant, feeding an anteater some yogurt, letting meerkats surround me as they go after crickets, and my personal favorite: playing with clouded leopard cubs.  I had such a good time and met some of Jason's old friends who turned out to be such fun people.  I also got free food all the three days I was there because Fossil Rim paid for it.  It was wonderful.  We left Nashville early on the 30th and made it home later that night.

 Jason holding a clouded leopard cub.

 

Me playing with a clouded leopard cub.

This week I have a phone interview at a place called Wildlife Safari in Winston, Oregon and we are doing a bunch of endoscopies on our cheetahs.  That should be interesting...

Pam and I in our Halloween costumes.

apologies

Please accept my sincere apologies for such a delay in the postings... I've been quite busy.

Last week I started my cheetah study.  Basically for 15 minutes, I sit and watch a group of cheetahs and record what they are doing.  This study in particular is focusing on male cheetah coalitions.  A coalition is a group of male cheetahs that live together and share a territory.  Cheetah coalitions exist in captivity and in the wild.  Females are generally solitary and don't enjoy company, but males benefit from living in groups.  They end up being quite bonded with their coalition mates.  Usually if we seperate two cheetahs that live together they will start making little chirping noises and pace around looking all stressed out.  The group I'm looking at is a three-male coalition made up of two brothers and an unrelated male.  The unrelated male is huge and is very aggressive while the brothers are mostly laidback.  The two brothers are very hard to tell apart, so when I'm watching them I often have to use binoculars to make sure I'm watching the right cat.  I'm basically looking for territorial behaviors and these can consist of urine marking, claw scraping, and object sniffing.  I've seen a lot of this stuff already after only six days of observations.  Once I'm done with the observations, I will send my data sheets to the study coordinator who will analyze the results from us and other institutions.  From there they will see if the data supports their mutiple hypotheses that they've proposed.

Cheetah

Michelle, a Mexican grey wolf

I'm really enjoying working with the cheetahs the most.  I like the wolves but the cheetahs are much more interactive and seem to have more personality.  They are letting me have more responsibility as time goes on.  I'm also getting to do more things than most past interns have been allowed.  That's probably because my "bosses" are also my friends, but I feel very competent with what I'm doing here.  I feel comfortable with the heads of the department here and asking for more responsibilites is easier for me to do here than at other places I've worked.  I'm really starting to remember why I liked this place so much last summer.

Mork, a coati, and I

Next week I am going to try to take the other interns here up to visit the sanctuary that I worked at in the spring time.  It will be nice to see all those big cats again! I do miss them a lot.  I think I want to at least get to work with either tigers or cheetahs.  I think they are my favorite and most interesting cats.

Ryan petting a cheetah.

 

Ryan's hand in a real dinosar footprint at Dinosaur Valley State Park

Last week, Ryan visited and we saw a couple things around town.  We went to the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco.  We also went to the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens and Water Gardens.  The climax of his visit was the Britney Spears concert at the American Airlines Center.  I was skeptical about the show because we all know she just lip synchs.  But to be honest, it was really fun!  The circus acts they had during the show were really cool: people hanging from the ceiling, legless trampolining midgets (yes!), and magic tricks.  It was a great show.

Since then, I've been doing a lot of reading.  There are husbandry manuals that explain all the basics (nutrition, health, enrichment, enclosure requirements, etc...) of keeping animals in captivity that I am reading.  I'm spending my free time reading the manuals for the cheetah, red wolves, maned wolves, and Mexican grey wolves.  It's a great source of knowledge.  I've also been spending some time watching The Wire, a crime drama that aired on HBO from 2001-2007.  It is SO GOOD!  I'm waiting to watch Season 3, but I've watched two seasons in less than two weeks!

A baby Addra gazelle

Rainy Day

I haven't been able to write much lately because I did not have internet for a while.  They moved us from the cottage to the actual intern house, which is located inside the park.  This house is not as nice as the other one, but I do have more space and actual desk in my room.  The other two guys' rooms are on the other side of the house, which is great because I like having my space.  They aren't the cleanest of people.  I prefer to have things my way and I think I'm just totally done with having roommates... The first night in this house, something was either crawling on the roof in the ceiling.  I'm guessing it was a raccoon.  Either way, it was LOUD!  It hasn't really happened since, and I am glad about that!

Today and yesterday have been extremely rainy.  It has rained non-stop both boys.  It sucks because most of the work I do here is outside.  So I have not been able to get much done.  Yesterday I spent a lot of time inside cleaning the kitchen and a room of the clinic.  At the end of my day, today, I was feeding the animals and I parked my vehicle to get out.  When I came back to get in the vehicle, I realized it had sunk in the mud and was stuck.  So, I had to radio someone to come help me get out of the mud.  I was SO WET, SO MUDDY, and cold.  It was a blast!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I work with the wolves 4 days a week and the cheetahs one day a week.  Well, I feel like one day a week working with cheetahs is not enough to learn as much as I'd like about them.  So, I spoke to one of my supervisors about it and they had a meeting to work out my schedule.  I might be switching my days off so that I can work an extra day with the cheetahs.  Also, they've offered me the chance to work on a cheetah research project while I'm here.  Someone out of the National Zoo in D.C. is doing a study and I will collect data from some of our cheetahs here and send it out to them.  It sounds like a pretty good opportunity to spend some time up on Cheetah Hill and to network with other people and maybe gain some references.

87 degrees is cool here.

Well my first three days of working alone went well.  Nothing went wrong.  I was also fairly productive:  I cleaned the carnivore kitchen, scrubbed and refilled the coati and red wolf pools, raked the leaves from a maned wolf enclosure, weed-whacked maned wolf holding pens and the area around wolf circle, and dug up a cactus that was in the way.  I managed to not get poked while removing and transporting the cactus, but later I found a bunch of cactus hairs (they still hurt!) on the underside of my shirt.  So, for the past couple of hours I've been removing random cactus hairs from my belly, chest, and hands. Awesome.

On last Thursday, my first day working here, I helped crate and then carry a cheetah for a move.  I sat in the back of the pick-up truck next to the crated cheetah and held on to it to make sure the crate didn't slide around.  The cheetah's name was Sunshine and she was being moved to our cheetah facility on the hill.  There is a male up there that they want her to breed with.  How many people have been able to sit in the back of a truck with a cheetah?

Inglourious Basterds was a fantastic movie!

FYI, my address:

c/o Fossil Rim Wildlife Center
2155 County Road 2008
Glen Rose, TX 76043

My Day

I'm going to outline my typical day here at Fossil Rim:

I work Thursday through Monday, with Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. On Thursdays I work with Jason and the 20 cheetahs here at Fossil Rim.  Every other day, I work with the wolves and coatis in the Intensive Management Area (IMA).

I begin my day at the carnivore kitchen which is attached to the center's vet clinic.  It's a very small kitchen with a fridge, a sink, and just enough room for the animals' diets and enrichment items.  In here we prepare the food for the animals and keep record of important stuff, such as how much each animal did not eat, any medical problems, or just anything unusual that may have happened throughout the day.  Each day a daily log sheet needs to be filled out with this information on it.  Some animals also need medication and this is where we prepare it.

 

This is Pia, a female maned wolf.

Most of my animals eat dog kibble.  When you think about it, wolves and dogs are very closely related so it makes sense.  They get Purina lamb and rice kibble.  The maned wolves eat kibble but also get a bunch of fruits and veggies in their diets because they are omnivores.  The coatis are also omnivores and eat a bunch of stuff like fruits, eggs, peanuts, and chicks.  Once the morning diets are completed, I feed the animals.  I go into the pens with the maned wolves, red wolves, and coatis.  The Mexican grey wolves can be more aggressive, so I do not go into their pen alone.  Though they can be dangerous if cornered, the maned and red wolves are much more scared of humans than anything and are not aggressive.  The coatis love human interaction and I've already had them climb up my legs and onto my shoulders.  They are fun but they stink.

 A coati eating its diet.

After feeding time, I need to pickup poop in the yards.  The maned wolf is pretty smelly and needs to be cleaned up daily.  The red wolves' should probably be picked up every other day.  The same with the Mexican greys.  Once pickup is done, it's time to do dishes and by the time those are done, it's almost lunch time. 

The afternoon is reserved for projects and random chores, which may include cleaning out wolf pools, yard work in the animals' yards, and enrichment.  The maned wolves and the coatis both get a PM diet as well, so that is usually prepared and delivered to the animals between 4 and 5, before the end of the day.

 A cheetah.  I love these cats.

So far, I have only worked with my supervisors, Kristen and Jason.  Tomorrow I start working on my own and I will continue to work alone for 4 days out my work week.  This is VERY rare for an internship and I think I will become much more confident in my work because of the independence this place provides their interns.  I have yet to really work with the cheetahs (that starts next week), so I am really excited to get started with them.  So far, I'm having a good time.  It's nice that I already know the staff and I don't have to go through that awkward stage where I don't know anybody.

Let's hope my first week working alone goes alright.

On a sidenote:  I was mentioned on the Cheetah Conservation Fund website a few weeks ago: Click Here to Read the Article.

Back in Texas

Well I finally made it back to Texas and have actually already worked my first week here. I have a short recap of my trip down here:

We left Ohio on Monday morning with plans to arrive in Branson around 6:00 PM. The drive was going great until we got to St. Louis. As soon as we crossed the Missouri border, rain started falling so hard that we could not see ten feet in front of us. Because I hate driving in the rain since my accident last year (ick), we pulled off and waited out the hardest parts in a gas station parking lot. It was clear that the rain wasn't going to stop completely so we set off in moderate showers to cross the state of Missouri. About 4 hours later, we arrived in Branson at our fantastic hotel, the Residence Inn by Marriot. Our hotel room retailed at $180 a night, but thanks to our middle-man, William Shatner, we managed to name our own price for $58 a night - not bad for a one-bedroom suite with a full kitchen (free popcorn and coffee!!) and 2 flat-panel televisions (yes, I said two!).

Our main reason for coming to Branson was Silver Dollar City, a relative of Dollywood situated a few miles from Downtown Branson in the Ozark hills. We somehow got lucky and happened to be driving down during the park's Summer Ride Days, a week of cheap admission when it's mostly rides that are opened. The park normally boasts a number of demonstrating craftsmen and shows that weren't operating that week. This was great because we were able to get in for a great value just to ride the rides. I celebrated a milestone at Silver Dollar City: my 200th roller coaster! The honor went to Powder Keg: A Blast in the Wilderness, a neat coaster that launches you over a hill and through the woods, but somehow manages to not end up at grandmother's house (LOL). Because Branson is, quite frankly, extremely hokey and almost entirely not our thing, we didn't do much else there.

The next day we finished driving 8 more hours to Glen Rose, Texas. The drive through Arkansas was absolutely beautiful. The only interesting thing about Oklahoma was that we drove through Carrie Underwood's hometown (yippee!?). We finally arrived in Texas and the Dallas area just in time for rush-hour and added about an hour to our arrival time. Now I'm here, living in the same house as before, but this time with a housemate named Tony.

My current internship is going to be a little different than my previous two. This time I will be working with three species of wolves, small carnivores named coatis, and 20 cheetahs. Here's a little background info pulled from wikipedia about each of these animals...

Mexican Grey Wolves (Canis lupus baileyi)

Until recent times, the Mexican Wolf ranged the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts from central Mexico to western Texas, southern New Mexico, and central Arizona. By the turn of the 20th century, reduction of natural prey like deer and elk caused many wolves to begin attacking domestic livestock, which led to intensive efforts by government agencies and individuals to eradicate the Mexican Wolf. Hunters also hunted down the wolf because it killed deer. Trappers and private trappers have also helped in the eradication of the Mexican Wolf. (Note that recent studies completed by genetics experts show evidence of Mexican Wolves ranging as far north as Colorado). These efforts were very successful, and by the 1950s, the Mexican Wolf had been eliminated from the wild. In 1976, the Mexican Wolf was declared an endangered subspecies and has remained so ever since. Today, an estimated 300 Mexican Wolves survive in 49 facilities at the United States and Mexico.

Red Wolves (Canis rufus)
 

The Red Wolf (Canis rufus) is a North American canid which once roamed throughout the Southeastern United States and is a glacial period survivor of the Late Pleistocene epoch.^[3] Its natural range extends from Texas to Florida. A population is being reintroduced to North Carolina.^[4] Scientists suggest that Red Wolf populations were extirpated from the wild and are now highly endangered.

Maned Wolves (Chrysocyon brachyurus)

 The Maned Wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus) is the largest canid of South America, resembling a large fox with reddish fur.

The Maned Wolf has often been described as "a Red Fox on stilts" due to its similar coloration and overall appearance, though it is much larger than a Red Fox and belongs to a different genus. The adult animal stands almost 1 m (3.3 ft) tall at the shoulder, and weighs 20 to 25 kg (44 to 55 lb).^[5] The maned wolf is the tallest of the wild canids. The long legs are probably an adaptation to the tall grasslands of its native habitat.

 

Coatis (Nasua narica)

 

Coatis, genera Nasua and Nasuella, also known as hog-nosed coons,^[1] snookum bears, and Brazilian aardvarks, are members of the raccoon family (Procyonidae). They are diurnal mammals native to South, Central, and south-western North America. The word "coatimundi" (pronounced /koʊˌɑːtɨˈmʌndi/ ^[2]) is a commonly used misnomer applied to solitary adult males of N. nasua. The term is reported to be derived from the Tupi language

 Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus)

 

The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is an atypical member of the cat family (Felidae) that is unique in its speed, while lacking climbing abilities. The species is the only living member of the genus Acinonyx. It is the fastest land animal, reaching speeds between 112 and 120 km/h (70 and 75 mph)^[3] in short bursts covering distances up to 460 m (1,500 ft), and has the ability to accelerate from 0 to 110 km/h (68 mph) in three seconds, faster than most supercars.^[4] Recent studies confirm the cheetah's status as fastest land animal^.

 

 

 ^{I will update soon with more information.}