Whale Hello There!

Hi there people! Welcome back to this blog!

First, I'm sorry about the lateness of this post. I would've published it sooner, but I just started a new job today, so life's been pretty hectic. 

Anyway, I'm not sure how many of you read my first Week 2 post, but if you didn't, then to sum it up, I chose to study human impact on the behaviors of the American Kestrel and the Great Horned Owl. 

So, this week has been really laid back. No huge animal or people emergencies. The majority of my work this week has been at my computer, typing up old records and organizing them into fancy spreadsheets. (I know the pictures are slightly blurry, but I tried. Also, the pictures are gigantic, so I apologize for that.) 

What you see in this first picture is the number of animals from each species brought in at each month. The green highlight means that the animal exceeded a total of 10 from late January to March, and the blue highlight means those are the ones that I chose to continue compiling data for. Those rainbow tabs at the bottom each represent the data for why the animal was brought in and (in some cases) how it was injured.

I typed everything in shorthand, so here's a little key so you can follow along:
AmKe: American Kestrel
RT Hawk: Red-Tailed Hawk
That green tab says Mallard if you can't read it
GHO: Great Horned Owl
BUOw: Burrowing Owl
NT Cor: Neotropical Cormorant
COHA: Cooper's Hawk

HBC: Hit by car
PTS: Put to sleep
FOG: Found on ground
DOA: Dead on arrival
D24H: Dead in 24 hours
"No fix" means that there were no apparent injuries to fix
R14, R15, and F10 are enclosures to where the birds were transferred after recovery

This is the spreadsheet for the Great Horned Owl. I'm not done with June, so there'll definitely be more to add there. Snickers, Darwin, Hedwig, and Igor are all the names of foster owls that the fledglings or nestling were paired with.

You guys may be wondering what I hope to gain by going through all this information. Well, I feel that this is the best way to determine if there's a pattern in why the animals are brought in. For example, in the period March through May, there are many reports of Great Horned Owl hatchlings found on the ground or fallen from their nest. From this, I can gather the breeding season of the Great Horned owls in the more urban environments and compare them to that of the wild owls. Additionally, I can find some correlation as to why so many baby owls are being brought in. To illustrate, there has been a constant problem with people bringing in fledglings who they find on the ground because they believe the parents abandoned them. However, fledglings are young birds just learning to fly, so there's a good chance that the bird just tried to fly and didn't quite make it. However, a lot of people misunderstand the situation and unintentionally separate the young bird from its parents. Just as some advice, if you come across a baby bird on the ground, the best thing to do is either leave it alone or put it back in its nest (if you can reach the nest easily without hurting the bird). Chances are, the parents probably did not abandon it. Also, there's a common myth that if a human touches a baby bird, the parent bird will not recognize the baby because of the human's scent and abandon it. This is not true: most birds have a very weak sense of smell and probably cannot detect a human's. That was a pretty quick summary of my attempt at working and researching, so feel free to ask me questions if you have any. (Also, next week I will create a post describing my online research of wild American Kestrel and Great Horned Owl's behavior, so be on the lookout for that.)

Well, besides all of that, I guess there's the upside that I'm now a kind of official "meet-and-greet" intern who answers the doorbell if people bring in a package or an animal, so that's been a fun experience. Oh, and I got to "meet" someone who works at the Phoenix Zoo. Her name is Nicole, and she's one of the hoofstock keepers, but the really cool thing is that we actually recognized each other (if you don't remember, I volunteer at the zoo), and we started talking about lots of stuff, so yay, friendships!

Okay, before I go on any more tangents, let's talk about our animal of the week, the platypus!!!!

So I'm going to be honest, this is one of the weirdest and coolest animals/mammals in the world, at least, as far as I know. In fact, it's so cool that when it was first discovered, scientists thought it was a hoax. Why? Because no mammal should be what the platypus is. So, there's just so many strange things going on with this animal that I'm going to share 5 facts with you. You may know some, but you can just read them all anyway:

1) The platypus is one of the two mammals in the world to lay eggs (the other is the echidna). This is strange as one of the defining things of mammalia is live birth.

2) The platypus is born with teeth, even though it has a duck bill. The teeth do fall out while the animal is young, but scientists wonder why it has them in the first place. Additionally, the platypus is carnivorous, which is funny since it now doesn't have teeth. Its diet contains a variety of worms and larvae.

3) The platypus has no nipples, which causes the female mammal to secret milk from its skin. A lot of people are more aware of this fact due to one episode in Phineas and Ferb where one character becomes Perry the Platypus and begins to "sweat milk."

From a more scientific standpoint, this is what's happening. When the young hatch, the female starts secreting milk and the young platypuses drink from two special grooves covered by fur on the female’s abdomen. So, really, Perry shouldn't have been able to sweat milk as he is a male platypus (or is (s?)he???).

4) The platypus is venomous, and is the only known Australian mammal known to be venomous. Apparently, adult males have a sharp spur on the back of their hind legs, which is used to inject poison. 

5) Finally, the platypus has the unique ability of electroreception. Ampullary electroreceptors in the bill allow response to low-frequency electric signals that are generated by animal nerves and hearts, at least, that's the theory (Sherwood 2004).

Okay, so that's all for now. I may have missed some crucial information (but probably not). If so, I'll just come back and edit my post and you guys will all be surprised if you ever reread this post.

Yay, okay, so have a nice life, and eat your vegetables?