What a busy couple of weeks it has been!
As stated on the main boards, I was recently engaged to my boyfriend Steve. A fellow animal lover, he has three rabbits, which are mentioned in the earlier posts of this blog. One of these rabbits is Thanator, the little stray bunny I found walking dogs at my pet sitting job. He was just a tiny little baby when I last posted photos of him, and has since been growing. He's also become extremely bonded to Steve and spends much of his time out sitting on Steve's shoulder with his head snuggled under his chin. On the other hand, he doesn't seem terribly fond of
me; when I pick him up, he chews, thumps his feet, and "digs" at me - behavior which immediately stops once handed off to his "dad!" At any rate, here are a few photos of the lil bugger now that he's grown up a tad:
He's developed some lovely dark markings on his face and paws, which is super cute when paired with the white fuzz on the bottoms of his feet.
Lucy, Steve's flemish giant, has been having a busy couple of weeks. Steve has his own business, an education program for children, called
Learning Gone Wild. He brings animals to groups of young people to teach them about their biology, ecology, conservation, and captive care. While Lucy isn't truly an "exotic" pet, being domesticated, she is still an excellent ambassador for bunnies, which all too often receive poor care. Business has been booming recently, and she's been to four shows in the last two weeks!
Learning Gone Wild was an endeavor that Steve started last summer due to the slack job market for Zoo Animal Technicians. He's always been passionate about exotics and has quite a collection himself, and realized that he could be using his animals to instill respect and interest from the public in such creatures. I worked with him to develop the business (including pouring hours into making all of the site graphics!) and act as one of the guest demonstrators with some of my own critters. Because I would like a career in education, it is a great opportunity to get some experience under my belt. I love teaching people about animals, so I'm quite excited that I'll be bringing some of my amphibians and invertebrates out tonight for one of Steve's shows. It may not be a typical idea of a nice night out for an engaged couple, but it's what we love to do.
My ownrabbits continue to thrive with better care. We had a minor blip when we switched to 50/50 new and old pellets as Brindam had a day of soft stools, but this was possibly more linked to the fact that I've been going heavier than usual on the greens, because after a day of just hay the issue resolved and she has since been doing fantastic. It's nice to see the old girl really coming out of her shell. She has been much more playful since we started bringing her out, and the weight is slowly dropping off. If only I could manage to get my cat to shape up his behavior and body so efficiently and effectively! (lol)
The other day when I was cleaning the rabbits, I stumbled upon an unexpected visitor in their hay. We buy hay by the bale and use it both as food and bedding for our buns, and when I pulled apart a flakeI saw a tiny flash of bright green. Concerned that it might be something synthetic, like a bit of stray plastic, I picked it up and found what I thought was a dead assassin bug nymph. I have an affinity for invertebrates and wanted to keep the body for closer inspection and ID (it's
Zelus luridus from what I can gather, in case you care). But much to my surprise, as it warmed in my palm, it came to life! The poor little beast was compressed in a frigid bale of hay with no food or water for god only knows how long, and had quite a shrunken abdomen, which you can see in the photo below:
It being much too cold to set him back outside, especially in such poor body condition, I've set him up in a small case with some leaves and dirt, then called up Steve as I was out of sufficiently small cockroaches to feed the little guy. Being the stand-up fellow that he is, he stopped everything to catch me some tiny nymphs so I could feed my new little friend. He leapt on the first nymph with gusto and his abdomen is starting to fill out nicely! Should he survive to spring, I know a great release site where he can hopefully go off and make more assassin bugs.
It was a busy day to have to deal with an assassin bug. For one, I had to perform a significant cleaning on my goldfish tank and set the filter back up. The filter on my 75g goldfish tank broke two days ago, emptying water all over the floor - and the power strip running the filtration to the three tanks in the dining room! :shock:Thankfully nothing happened to our electric or our fish, and I was able to repair the filter with silicone.It made the subsequent dayswaiting for the silicone to set quite harrowing as water quality declines quickly in goldfish tanks without a strong filter - even in a large aquarium.Thankfully everyone pulled through the stress of it just fine, and because I had to clean everything so exhaustively, the tank is quite sparkling clean!
On top of that, yesterday was major cleaning + nail and beak trim day for the larger parrots. About 4-5 times per year, I take the cages outside and power wash them. They're spot cleaned every day and perch scrubbed every week, but parrots are messy critters and sometimes you just need to blast their cages. This means removing everything but the perching (with a good 20 toys in each cage, this takes a while), pulling the birds, trimming their nails and if needed beaks, then re-assembling it all. About the only bird cooperative in this process is my conure Aspen; Sami and Pretty Bird, the Amazons, hate nail and beak day with a passion and will aggressively fight me every step of the way. Sami actually flew up at my face when I tried to catch him, which could have done some serious damage!
It's all worth it, however, to see the cages beautifully clean and the toys re-arranged so that the birds get to explore their homes all over again. This also gives me time to repair toys; I don't have enough money to constantly buy new parrot toys if I want to have money left for vet bills and great diets, so I buy parrot toy parts and reconstitue old toys. There was a lot of taking apart mostly destroyed toys to save the remaining parts, then putting the pieces together to make new toys. The birds are none the wiser and very excited about all of the "new" stuff in their cages!
Well, as I've been typing this, Brindam's been running around the kitchen playing, but she's finally settling down for a rest under the table, so I think it's time to put down the laptop and go fetch Wendy for her turn out. Until next time!
opcorn2
