*just..... laughs*
My theory keeps being proven.
Today wasn't hell day, but man they got their money's worth. We worked our asses off.
Pick up the red tailed hawk and duck from Emergency Clinic.
Deal with now slightly angry hawk and situate in stainless steel cage to stay for a few days and heal the fracture.
Let bears out, clean and bleach denboxes, change shavings.
Train badger (so when working with V tomorrow I get to say I've been officially shown how to train her by JO and will be doing it, thank you very much, go do...... whatever it is you do..... and stay away from me......)
Go to Children's Park and pitch in spreading out the three huge mounds of dirt the tractor dumped over the fence to nicely cover most of the paddock (21 total piles, the others had been spread out during the week).
Piles of wood STILL there from the collapsed shed that have been ignored by the other keepers during the week get loaded into the Gator and trucked out to the wood pile.
Feed the Road Runner and Burrowing Owls (JO's key was sticking and she couldn't get the lock open so was cool, got to hand feed at least the RoadRunner if the Owls just stared at me, warily)
Raptors in 1.5 hours.
Lunch (finally!)
Midday training of bears.
Make food for tomorrow.
Restrain the slightly angry red tailed hawk to clean her cage once again. She'll easily down 6 or 7 chicks, so we gave her that much, and that much tends to come out.... so...... birds can be fairly smelly, we'd rather take a few minutes to clean the cage again.
Clean the kestrel's carrier (he's indoors because of laryngitis so healing) and said kestrel decides he want to be FREE so me, being super keeper that I am only have him on my hand and not leashed, only holding onto his jesses, sort've.... lets him be FREE in the reptile house for about five minutes before catching him again *chuckles* No biggie, nice exercise.....
The heron enclosure is going to have it's pond rebuilt Tuesday, so we'd have to catch them tomorrow and move them. Now, tomorrow V will be there, and I don't want to put up with her incompetence, so opted to try to do it today. Caught all four in about five minutes.... but it's not easy. Have to use the net and be gentle, long legs can break easily, sharp pointy beaks have good aim for your eyes and those necks are longer and quicker than they look. Not to mention, have you ever had a heron scream at you? Most evil sounding birds I have ever heard.... those waterfoul. (Dealt with a Blue Crane a few weeks ago and I could have sworn that bird was possessed.) Anyway, this is very entertaining for little kids that are out by the duck pond to watch. Believe me.
Herons successfully moved!
Badger enclosure needs dire revamping, and being open for the holiday tomorrow, we have found perfect branches to move in while out by the woodpile this morning. JO and I bust our asses for 45 minutes and pull this off. We dug out and collapsed all her tunnels.... which included one very tall keeper shimmying down into one of the holes to plug it with rocks halfway. You guessed it. I had always figured one of the _LAST_ things someone would want to do is crawl down a badger hole *chuckles* Luckily we had already put her in her night enclosure. But all the tunnels were collapsed and filled with rocks, several stumps buried partially to provide little climbing platforms, new branches and logs moved in, old branches moved about, dirt spread about everywhere..... all within an hour.
Oh shit, time for closing, it's already 5. Rush over to bears, bring them in, go out to clean the enclosure and find that there's what looks like vomit. It's not stool.... it's vomit. This is not good. We've already had the diarrhea problem off and on over the last week, so this could be very, very bad. Rush through cleaning the enclosure and go in to call the vet tech (for the third time today, T had some concerns about one of the bobcats already, and that threw her behind). Since I'll be at work tomorrow, I'm in charge of keeping an eye on the bears throughout the day and keeping the Vet Tech on tabs, not much we could do for them, and they were eating their dinners just fine......
But..... even with all of that going on, not one injured animal came in *laughs* Go figure.
Holy smokes...that was all in one day?! And here I thought I was overloaded.
So what exactly was it that you were training the badger to do? And why have to undo all that tunnel-building work that she did? [Mirror_rorriM]