Hummingbird Rescue

Pretty much the only people who read this blog are the other people who went to Maine with me and can already tell what this post will be about, but I'm going to share anyway. I was in Maine this past weekend, catching up with some awesome Drew people, and we had a bit of an adventure. Cori had just climbed into the kayak with me against my will when we heard the people hanging out on the docked boat scream something about finding a huge bug in the water. We paddled back and it turned out that they had fished a tiny, very wet hummingbird out of the water. Lucky for us Cori spent 6 months as an intern at a wildlife rehabilitation center, and she jumped out to save the day. She wasn't very optimistic, because we didn't know how long the hummingbird had been in the water (let alone how it got there), and the metabolism of a hummingbird is so high that they pretty much need to eat constantly. We gave it a shot though, and tried to dry off the tiny wet hummingbird.
As you can see, he is tiny and adorable. And in this picture, quite wet. He could also be a she, for all I know. Cori said he looked nearly full-grown, but I think he was a young bird. First, once we dried him off a bit and he got over what must have been the very shocking experience of being in the lake, he starting making these high-pitched squeaks that sounded a lot like begging calls. When we started feeding him, he also opened his long beak wide while squeaking, just like other baby birds. I'm not a hummingbird expert, though, so who knows.

At first we thought feeding him might be a problem, because we didn't have a syringe, but I suggested we use a straw and cover the opening so that the suction would keep the sugar water in. (Who knew something I used to do to entertain myself while waiting for my food at restaurants would come in handy?) Once he had eaten a lot and seemed to be out of crisis, Cori set up a little box for him complete with a twig for a perch.


We named him Flit, after the hummingbird in Pocahontas. We fed him for the rest of that day and tried to release him, but he flew away kind of awkwardly and then sat on a bush looking confused. We kept him overnight, and the next day got ready to release him. We thought at first it might not work, because he kept sitting by the house and peeping. He even tried to fly back in at one point. However, eventually he flew away. I hope he's alright. I'm a little worried, because he didn't seem like a very strong flier, and if he's young he might not have all the skills he needs to survive. But we can't have a pet hummingbird that needs to be fed every hour, and at the very least we saved him from drowning in a lake. All in all, a good deed.

(That's me looking way too excited about Flit sitting on my hand. He loved me, and I loved him. The end.)

AZ in Animals

Hello there...so as you can tell by the fact that I posted once in June and never in July, I am terrible at keeping a blog. I should have known this would happen - after all, I was never able to keep up a diary as a child despite numerous attempts. But to be fair, I've barely been home this summer. I went on a bunch of trips for my research, and I just got back recently from a 10 day animal behavior field course in Arizona. This will be the subject of my post today. Introducing, the animals I met in Arizona!!
It turns out, Arizona is much prettier than I expected. All I really knew about the place is that it has the Grand Canyon and Sonoran Desert in it. I thought it would be flat and made of desert, but as you can see, it's actually much greener than I thought it would be. And everywhere I went, in AZ and New Mexico (we were right next to the border and spend a lot of time in NM), I was surrounded by mountains. It was awesome.

Part 1: Amphibians

Surprisingly, I saw a bunch of amphibians in the wild. One night, while driving back from the Rodeo Tavern in New Mexico, we found this guy on the road.
He is a huge, fat, spadefoot toad. I am holding a baby here.
Part 2: Invertebrates

This was the first cool animal I met in AZ. It is a walking stick. We found it in the desert. I put it on my head.
This is called a vinegaroon. He resembles a scorpion, and was pretty creepy looking to tell you the truth...
...but I held him anyway.

What you are about to see may confuse you.
What is in my mouth is, in fact, this:These are honey pot ants, and the big yellow balls are actually the swollen abdomens of the ants who serve as repletes for the rest of the colony. That is filled with a sweet, delicious substance that feeds the rest of the colony. And, on special occasions, animal behavior classes.

Part 3: Birds
I didn't get to hold any birds, for obvious reasons, but here is a hummingbird. We spontaneously drove 2 hours to a place that has the record for the most hummingbird sightings in one day, and we saw 8 species. The record is 13.
Part 4: Mammals
This is me feeding Mickey, the deer. Her mom was raised at the station, so she has lost her fear of humans and hangs around and lets people feed her pretzels and apples. She is awesome. Her tongue was sticky.
This dog was awesome.

Part 5: ReptilesI met a lot of lizards in AZ. This is a grumpy looking horned lizard. He is actually very sweet - when I tried to release him he just stayed sitting on my hand. He was being kept temporarily with tons of other lizards in an observatory by a researcher at the station.

This guy, Sceloporus jarovii (Yarrow's Spiny Lizard) lived on the wall between my room and the guy behind me's room. We tried for days to catch him. It was much easier once we got nooses, which are long pieces of wood with a piece of string tied into a slipknot on the end. Slip it over a lizard's head and pull, and WHAM! He's yours.

This is a Western Hognose Snake that is kept in the office. He was cool. We also saw three species of rattlesnakes in the wild: Black-tailed, Banded Rock, and Mojave. I have pictures of them but I am getting sleepy so I'm not going to post them.

That was a lot of pictures, so hopefully that makes up a little for my lack of posting. I hope you enjoyed them!!

Meet Jake

I am not very good at this whole "update regularly" thing, but I will try to be better from now on. Things have been pretty crazy lately, even though I am finally done with the semester. Plans for my research are in full swing, and next week I will be recording fairy bluebirds at the Central Park Zoo, Rosamond something or other zoo in Syracuse, and the National Zoo in Washington DC. I am also making plans to fly to the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro. I will give more details about my project in a way that won't bore people soon.

I have yet to introduce you to my other favorite parrot, Cracker, but I don't have any pictures of her and she deserves a lovely blog entry. And she really deserves a video of her crazy antics, but I can't figure out how to make the videos on my camera record sound. I will figure something out, she's a ridiculous bird.

Oh, and an update: OT, the palm cockatoo from my first entry, apparently has decided playing with me is not enough. Every time I go in there to give him enrichment and say hi, he refuses to come down - even for a walnut! Instead, he goes to a hole in a tree, sticks his head in, and looks at me to see if I'm watching. The first time this happened I got very confused and sad that he didn't want to play with me. I asked one of the keepers, Myra, if she knew what was going on, and she said, "Yes. That means he likes you. He wants to show you his hole."

Well then. I'm apparently a parrot heartbreaker. I guess I should be flattered, given the kind of guys that hit on me he's actually a step up. (I am referring, of course, to the infamous, "That's a lovely skirt. Where did you get it? I wanna buy it...and wear it..." dude.)

But back to the point. So this is Jake, a blue-fronted Amazon!

Jake is in one of the huge walk-through exhibits we have, so he doesn't wait for human attention like Cracker and OT. However, he loves enrichment too. The first time I went into the exhibit to give him something by myself - in this case, a wood block with slots that I stuck sunflower seeds into - he happened to be perched right above where I planned to hang his enrichment. He watched me very carefully as I tried to find a good place to put his toy, and to make conversation I said. "Hey Jake, what are you doing?"

"...What are YOU doing?" said a slightly feminine, whiny voice.

I was very shocked. As it turns out, that's pretty much the only thing Jake knows how to say, but the timing was awesome. It was almost as good as the first time I met Paprika, which I guess is a story to save for another entry. Anyway, Jake and I bonded as he took seeds out of his toy. We play the whistle game - he makes same kind of whistle, I imitate it; he does another one with a different tune, I try to repeat, etc. I think he likes this game because there is no way I can ever win. Eventually he does something that is just not possible for a human to repeat. But I try just the same.

Today I learned that Jake really likes when I stick sunflower seeds into a pear and put it in a little metal cage. He flew all the way from the top of the far side of the exhibit to come check it out when I got his attention, and he was very impatient as I found a place to hang it up. Cool bird.

The end!

Babies!

I have been finishing up the semester (and my first year of grad school yay!!) so I haven't updated in a while. Sorry!! Now that I am finally done I will try to update more, especially since I am finally getting my thesis figured out. I am sleepy and need to listen to fairy bluebird calls, but LOOK there's pictures of baby chukars!!! They are huge now. I need to bring my camera to get a picture of the baby argus and her mommy before she gets too big. The end.

Frogs!

This is a quick post because I need to go to bed. I am not only into parrots, but all kinds of animals, and this post will focus on my second favorite group: herps, aka reptiles and amphibians! This weekend I went on an overnight field trip with my herpetology class, and I had an awesome time. We caught a whole bunch of salamanders, frogs, toads, a tiny snake, a box turtle, and a fence lizard. But for me, the highlight was this:
Ignore my dorky expression and the head lamp I'm wearing, and look at my hand. I caught the endangered pine barrens tree frog! And what's better, I caught it within 5 minutes of the start of the search, and found it by imitating his call so that he called back. Two of my friends and I got close enough to him that I could see him and grabbed him. It was awesome. He is an absolutely gorgeous frog, I didn't know there were frogs that gorgeous in New jersey. I got an awesome shot after we all finished admiring him and put him back on a tree.

The purple markings and yellow flash coloration on his legs (that you can barely see above but is clearer below) are incredible. This was a huge, fat male. He should get lots of ladies.

I am tired, but I want to include this picture of a carpenter (?) frog and a green frog we caught because I think they look funny. Good night!

Welcome / Meet OT

Hi! I already wrote most of my first post but I am still learning how to use this and I accidentally deleted it, so sorry if what I am about to write sounds rushed. My name is Emily, and I am currently finishing my first year in the MA program in Conservation Biology at Columbia University. If you had told me in high school that I would end up going to graduate school in the sciences, I never would have believed you. I was a theater nerd throughout high school, and I had dreams of going to a musical theater program and performing on Broadway. However, the summer after my junior year I volunteered at the camp at the Staten Island zoo, and everything changed. As I watched the counselors bring out various animals and tell the campers all about them, and even let them touch some of them, I realized that I wanted to be able to get kids excited about nature by letting them come into contact with animals. I signed up for the next course to become a docent at the zoo, which is basically a volunteer who is trained to handle animals and interpret them for the public.

One of my first tasks in the docent course was to choose two animals in the education department to get trained on handling. I chose Charlie, our 8-foot red-tailed boa constrictor, and Buddy, our male jandaya conure. Both of these animals really influenced me, and I still have trouble choosing between reptiles and birds. But it was Buddy that really made me realize that I wanted to work with animals. Anyone who has ever interacted with a parrot can tell you that they can be picky. Buddy was no exception, and in my first few times working with him I often ended up with bloody fingers from his sharp beak. If Charlie had bitten me I probably would have abandoned my hopes of working with him, but I was determined to get this tiny, spunky parrot to like me. I visited him in his cage in the animal hospital every chance I got, and I eventually decided to try singing to him. That was the first break through, and as I sang Buddy danced on his perch. Eventually he trusted me enough to step up onto my finger, and eventually even enough to let me scratch his head. Whenever I took him out onto the zoo floor to introduce him to the guests he would climb up on my shoulder and preen my hair. When the tropical rainforest wing got quiet, I hummed to him quietly and he danced on my shoulder, leaning as far down as he could to look at my face. Sometimes I thought I would go deaf from his loud vocalizations, but it was completely worth it. I went back to the zoo last summer to teach zoo camp after being away throughout college, and it took almost no time at all to get Buddy to climb back up on my shoulder.

Since then, I've worked with a lot of parrots, and each experience has taught me something different. I still love snakes as well, but there is something about parrots that just makes me feel comfortable, despite their huge beaks. My master's thesis is focusing on analyzing fairy bluebird vocalizations, and I'm sure I'll discuss that at some point in this blog, but for now I want to focus on the reason I'm creating this blog. I am currently an intern in the Ornithology Department at the Bronx Zoo, which is where I will be doing my thesis research over the summer. However, part of my job is to assist the keepers in the World of Birds exhibit, and I have met some incredible birds there. I want to start this blog off with a bang, so let me introduce you to my favorite parrot at the zoo!

This is OT, a palm cockatoo. His name is OT because apparently when he was being raised a lot of zookeepers were paid for overtime. :) As you can see, like other cockatoos he has a crest on his head that goes up when he gets excited. His cheeks also flush bright red. In the picture above, he is extremely excited because he found the walnut I hid in a tube inside a cereal box for his enrichment.

We give our parrots enrichment every day, usually in the form of hiding their favorite seeds inside something they need to tear apart or figure out. As you can see, OT's beak is huge, so he can rip apart pretty much anything we can give him. He loves walnuts, and it's incredible to see how carefully he uses that scary beak. He cracks the walnut open and extracts the edible parts with his long, black-tipped tongue. It's really incredible to watch.

As cool as he is, at first glance OT is a pretty intimidating bird. He stands almost two feet tall, and that beak is about 6 inches long and could easily crush your hand if he wanted to. I went inside his exhibit one of my first weeks on the job, and watched jealously as the keeper played with him and he climbed on her arm and let her scratch his head. I thought it would take weeks, if not months, of getting to know him before I could actually handle him, just like it did with Buddy.

A week or two later, I was walking to the locker room and I noticed one of the keepers playing with OT just outside his exhibit. I sat next to her to watch, and within a few minutes OT had climbed over towards me and climbed up on my shoulder. It made me SO HAPPY. I had never thought I would be able to work with such an impressive looking bird so quickly, let alone that the bird himself would make the first move towards establishing a relationship. From that point, I was able to go into his exhibit and work with him. It can still be intimidating, especially when his beak gets close to you. It's especially unnerving when OT gets really excited. He hangs out with keepers on the ground, and if you've interacted with him enough and given him enough treats the extended crest and flushed cheeks apparently aren't enough for him to express his excitement. Before you know it, he crouches down with his wings extended, makes a whistling noise, and starts running around the exhibit. He particularly likes running up to crouching keepers and interns and putting his head between their knees, which is certainly not where you want a beak like that to go. You eventually learn to take it as a compliment, but it still makes my heart race when I'm not expecting it.

I have been working with OT for several months now, and I am pretty much in love with him. I met my friend Cori at the zoo on Sunday to give her a tour of the building where I work, and as soon as I passed OT's exhibit and said hi to him he got excited and moved as close to the glass as he could. He is without a doubt one of the most incredible birds I have ever worked with. Of course, there are lots of other beautiful and funny birds at the zoo, but they will have to wait for another post before I introduce them. I hope you like my new blog!