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.