A Panda-monic Week

Hello living creatures! 

How are you today? I got some pictures and lots of words for you, so let's just dive right into it! 

Okay, so on Tuesday, not much stuff happened. This was the day where I was probably most productive in my research. I wanted to continue studying any possible patterns that could be related to the kestrels abandoning their nests, so I looked at the average temperatures in Arizona of the last ten years. I also further analyzed how kestrels diets can change in urban setting compared to in the wild. The most noticeable thing I've found is the type of insects and rodents they eat due to the food's availability in the area. This could be significant because each insect would give the bird different nutrients, and some insects may have more protein or be easier for the kestrel to digest, so I think my next move is to learn if there's a type of "selection process" that birds have when choosing what to eat and how each food affects the bird. While doing this, I will also look into a new thing: man-made kestrel nests. Apparently, there's this new thing going around (really, just look it up online and it'll be everywhere) where people make nests for the kestrels out of boxes or something and use this to study kestrels or something of that sort. Anyway, I want to see how this impacts the bird's behavior, so that'll be fun to look at. That was Tuesday at my internship. 

However, Tuesday night, after fulfilling my duty as a waitress, I was called by my Girl Scouts troop leader (who was apparently reading my blog) about a wild cotton tail that her friend has found. Liberty's kind of a long drive, so instead of the friend driving up to Liberty the next day, I picked up the rabbit that night. I realized when I got to the friend's house that this rabbit was about five days old, so I had to rush to Safeway at like 10PM to get some goat milk to feed to the baby bunny. 

That night, I woke up every two hours to make sure the bunny was doing okay and that my homemade incubator was still working. I loved this experience because I had to research behavior in cottontails to learn how best to look after the baby. However, I ended up getting way too attached to it (and you know, the feeling was mutual. Whenever I put my hand in the box to get the bunny so I could warm it up or feed it, it crawled into my hand (which made my heart melt)), which made letting it go just that much harder. Anyway, in the end I had to give the bunny to Liberty (even though like 95% of me was screaming to keep it) because I knew that this was best for everyone (and my parents flatly rejected my idea for the new pet). So, that was that. The bunny experience also took up basically my entire Wednesday too, so the main things I did on Wednesday at Liberty was intake again. 

Look, it's so tiny and small and cute!!!

Finally, Thursday!!  So, this was kind of a weird day. For some reason, there was like some mosquito or something hanging out at my desk, because I got like ten bug bites in the first hour.

Basically me

Of course, I'm used to bug bites after growing up in Arkansas, but I still got really agitated and itchy, so for the remainder of my shift, I tried to avoid my desk as much as possible. This led me to get a personal tour of our new orphan care that recently opened (this is where newborn to juvenile birds get brought in) which was tons of fun. Also, I ended spending a lot of time with the American Kestrels and Great Horned Owls we had in rehab. This was particularly interesting because I was able to analyze each bird's behavior towards humans. If you remember from my last post, I said that the kestrels were "human-tolerant," which many of you had questions about. Basically, one of the top "statistical" ways to study the amount of "human-tolerance" an animal has (especially for a bird) is by how close you can get to it before it begins to panic and try to escape. Well, I experienced this first-hand when I was able to sit with the kestrels for a while (I wanna say about 30 minutes to an hour) without them caring at all. Literally, they just continued either eating, taking naps, or they just simply stared at me (which was the most "aggressive" response I got). However, the Great Horned Owls did not like me one bit. They gave me death glares; one owl got all puffed up to make it seem bigger (a classic defensive behavior), and two owls repeatedly clicked their beaks at me.

This is actually a puffed up Barn Owl,
but it was doing the same thing the GHO was.

I could tell that I agitated them, so I left pretty quickly, but I loved the differences between the two. Now, the problem with this observation is that the owls may just not have liked me (instead of humans in general) or perhaps there was some outside factor that I didn't take into account. So I tried. 

The California Condor.
Another animal I saw when I escaped my desk.

Okay, so usually I'd end off with my animal of the week....but, well, um, that's not gonna happen today? 

You see, because I got so busy (by busy, I'm mostly blaming the rabbit) I totally forgot to create a new poll for my next background until like Wednesday night, which unfortunately does not give you people enough time to vote. So, I can either give you guys another week, or I can talk about three different animals because at the moment the votes give me a three-way tie. Well, I'm selfish and lazy, so I chose the former option. Sorry. Really, I am. Please forgive me. Don't boycott my blog. I at least gave you some cute bunny pictures? Well, on that awkward note, I'm gonna quickly scamper away before there's like some big angry mob with torches and pitchforks. 

A tribute to the new Beauty and the Beast film 

Have a nice life, and here's your useless life advice for the week!