A Top Koala-ty Post

Welcome back, people who have the misfortune to read my blog (just kidding, my blog is probably the best part of your life (said the unrealistic optimist)).

So, I told you guys that this week would be all about Kestrels, and I was more or less right. Before we begin on whatever crazy thing I've done, I first want to go into the general behavior of the wild American Kestrel.  If you already know all about the kestrels (or you simply don't care), then I suggest you kinda skip ahead.

I don't really know how to organize this (or I'm just too lazy to try), so we're just gonna go for it, okay?

Mating and Nesting: Kestrels generally mate early spring to late summer, though they can breed any time of the year. Fun fact: kestrels mate for life. Their courtship involves a numerous of complicated flight displays that no human can do and calls (one call in particular: the "chitter"). Most pairs return to the same nesting sites each year. Kestrels, like the Great Horned Owls, are not nest-builders, so they instead nest in tree hollows, rock crevices, corners of buildings, telephone poles, and fence posts. Females will incubate the eggs, while males bring back food. When the offspring are about ten days old, the female can start hunting again. American kestrel offspring are altrical, which here means that they rely very heavily on their parents for food and protection.

Communication: I already kinda brought this up in the last section, but oh well. There are three main calls the kestrels use to communicate:
1) "Klee" or "Killy": for distress or excitement
2) "Chitter": used during courtships and breeding
3) Whine: this apparenly usually means hunger, and is generally more used by hatchlings or fledglings
Yeah, okay, that's all I got there.

Diets: I think the American Kestrels actually have pretty unique diets, considering their raptors and all. Then again, it's not so surprising since they're the smallest raptor bird (about 2.8-5 oz). During the summer, kestrels eat grasshoppers, crickets, butterflies, moths, and beetles (so mostly insects). However, during the winter, kestrels usually eat mice, voles, shrews, snakes, frogs, and small birds. I believe this dietary change is due to the fact that they need more sustenance in order to stay warm during the winter, as birds have very high metabolisms and their energy can deplete very quickly.

General facts: In the wild, kestrels live an average of one year and three months, but in captivity, they can live about 5 years and 2 months.  Human-related deaths seem to mostly be related to illegal poaching and trapping. They are usually hunted by Great Horned Owls (yay, connections between the two species). However, kestrels can sometimes avoid being prey because they have two black spots on the back of their head to confuse predators (because the spots would look like eyes).

Kestrels are sexually dimorphic (which basically means the male looks different from the female). Below is a picture of a couple of the kestrels at Liberty Wildlife. I love it because it has both a male and female and you can clearly see how they differentiate physically.

Left: Male         Right: Female

So, the male kestrels has silvery-blue feathers on its head and wing tips in order to attract the attention of the female during courtship displays. The females are slightly larger, and have just a variety of brown feathers.

Okay, that's all I got for you there. Now, onto my next point: my activities at Liberty Wildlife!!

Yay, okay, so most of my week was spent getting those kestrel facts that I just bombarded you with. On Tuesday, I got to help assess the condition of a baby bunny that I also did intake on, so yay me!

It's so tiny! 

Besides that, I spent Wednesday sitting next to a Red-Tailed Hawk, so fun!

My new neighbor

I also got to use the copier a lot, because I needed to make a copy of the Species list (which is the records they keep of all animals ever brought in) from 2010 to 2016. I then got the percentage of the number of Great Horned Owls and kestrels out of all the animals brought in. I do have some graphs, but I haven't been able to deeply analyze the data yet, so I'll just give them to you for fun and talk about them in my next post.

Okay, let's see, other things I did.... umm, okay, so on Thursday, I realized that rehab (where all the injured animals are kept) was really big and I didn't know my way around it. So, I asked some people if they had a map, and apparently no one ever thought to create one because they already knew the place so well. So, I became a cartographer and mapped out all of rehab, along with the name each enclosure has and what animal is inside each enclosure. Right now, it's really just a rough sketch, but I'm gonna make it all fancy on a computer (you guys can look at it later) and my bosses say they'd be thrilled to use it for any new volunteers they get, so cool, I made a contribution that will last forever!

Also, I know I said I wanted to find a pattern between the kestrels by this week, and I think I got something with diet (because the kestrels diet is so finicky, and there's limited resources in urban areas) and nesting sites (because there are studies that have found that kestrels have begun abandoning their nesting sites (which if you remember from the nesting facts, is weird) and I wanna do some more research on that.

Now, without further ado, the animal of the week: the fennec fox!

They actually aren't this aggressive,
 but I wanted you guys to know that this fox
from Zootopia was a fennec fox (whose name was Finnick!).

I'm gonna let you guys know now that when I choose which animals to put in my polls, I don't have any facts of the thing beforehand. It's all just kinda random and impulsive. I say this because I think it's so great that when the time comes, I can research any animal on the internet and find some amazing things about it. All right, enough of that, time to get to business.

1) The fennec fox is the smallest of all the foxes, weighing about 2.2 pounds.
2) If you didn't already notice, it has humongous ears. Their ears allow them to dissipate heat and keep cool in the desert. On top of that, their hearing is so good that they can hear prey underground, so good for them!
3) Fennec foxes actually mate for life! This is actually pretty uncommon in canine species (I know there's some myth about wolves mating for life, but it was recently discovered that this is not true at all. Sorry.), so yay monogamy.

I know this post probably felt pretty rushed, and I apologize for that. I regret to tell my audience that I declared next week my Spring Break, so there's a 90% chance that I won't post anything next week. If I do, you don't have to comment on it because it'll be your Spring Break too. So let's just have an agreement that if you don't expect anything from me, I won't expect anything from you. :)

I know I usually end my post with a weird advice thing, but I'm running out of creativity, so instead I found some really bad life advice for you!

Spray you headphones with some
"Johnson's no more tangles" when they are tangled

Right, I hope you enjoyed that. Have a nice life, and make sure to try and relax during your Spring Break!

Some other pictures of my wild (haha, pun) week:

Burrowing Owl
(it is actually really small, so sorry if you can't see it well) 

Another little Kestrel

Raining Great Horned Owls

I've returned!!!! 

Now, this week has been super busy and super fun. I started Tuesday just going over some studies about Great Horned Owls and general urbanized birds. After discussing with some people, I found a connection I thought was pretty interesting. So, in the wild, Great Horned Owls are not nest-builders. They often take abandoned nests (usually from Red-Tailed Hawks) or use crevices or holes in trees or other places (Powell 2004). This is fine in the woods, but many owls have started migrating to the city due to the increase in food abundance and nesting sites (Shochat, et al 2008). In Arizona, especially in Maricopa county, this is especially dangerous because our environment doesn't have suitable trees that could be used for the owls' nests, which forces the owls to either use the crevices in palm trees, areas of a building, or flower pots. Now, these palm trees are extremely unstable and weak and cannot provide satisfactory nesting for the owls. Meanwhile, during spring and summer, the building and flower pots can heat up and potentially burn the nestlings, which force the nestlings to "abandon ship." This brings me to my next point. If you remember in my last post, I talked about the huge number of Great Horned Owl fledglings during February to May. With the information that urbanized owls have unstable nests, I was able to use my Wednesday to cross-reference the time owl orphans were brought in with the weather patterns (particularly wind speed and storms), and saw that days the owls were brought in correlated with higher wind speeds. From this, I was able to hypothesize that the high wind speeds cause the nestlings or fledglings to fall out of their nest, so when a person finds them, they'd be brought in here. I thought this was interesting because it was a clear example of how these owls may adapt to urbanization (by building or finding stronger nests), and also first sign that my research is leading to something that we might be able to change (yay!).

Great Horned Owl doing breaststroke, for fun

My next step is to go over the data from previous years, probably 2010-2015 or more. Then, I can establish a more solid pattern and see if owls have in fact been adapting to the cities (I would discover this if the number of owls brought in decreased over the years). I really wanted to accomplish this step during this week, but sadly my Thursday was busy with little kids.

So, I am excited to say that yesterday Liberty Wildlife held its first ever field trip, which consisted of 50 kindergartners and 10 chaperones. On Wednesday, I was led to believe that I would be helping Ms. Suits, my on-site mentor, lead an arts and crafts activity with the kids. On Thursday morning, however, I learned that one of the volunteers called in sick and that Ms. Suits had to leave me to lead the activity by myself. So, that was an experience. I was able to teach 50 very distracted and hyper little children how to make owl puppets out of paper bags and no one died, so I consider myself successful. Sadly, I don't have pictures because I was too busy working, but there might be some on the website, so I'll keep you guys updated on those.

Okay, so I don't think I have anything else to talk about (next week I really want to focus on American Kestrels, so be prepared for that), so I guess we'll go into the animal of the week: the sea otter, which just happens to be my favorite marine animal!

Hi, I'm a sea otter.

When we think of the sea otter, many of us just think of a very cuddly animal. Well, that may be true (in fact, I really hope it is) but here are some other interesting facts about this animal:

1) The otter is the only marine mammal without a layer of blubber (a.k.a. fat).

2) The otter has the thickest fur of any mammal (about 1 million hairs per square inch. To compare, the average human has about 2,200 hairs per square inch on his/her head).

3) Otters, in their free time, will build slides along the banks of rivers and spend the day playing in them.

Looking something like this

Well, that's all I have prepared for you this week. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, just post them below and I'll get back to you when and if I can.

Have a nice life, and treat others the way you want to be treated (#TheGoldenRule)!!!!

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?

I'm an Eager Beaver

Good day, people!

I know I'm startling you with this post, seeing as it's only Wednesday and all, but after even more filing and compiling of old records, my on-site mentor and I finally think we agree on a species for me to study. But wait! Before I actually tell you, I need to say first that because I am indecisive (as we all know), I think I am going to choose two animals (what?! plot twist) and then compare the behaviors between the two. Anyway, ENOUGH SUSPENSE, TIME TO KNOW:

Drum roll please!

I'm pretty sure I've chosen the American Kestrel and Great Horned Owl!! Yay, much excitement, we're all so happy, whoo!

American Kestrel

Great Horned Owl

So, what up with the sudden change in my project? Well, from my filing data compiling skills, I saw that the Great Horned Owl was the raptor brought in the most amount of times during the February to April 2016 period. This would therefore allow me to have more accurate data comparing more animals from the same species, making it a great species to study. However, the American Kestrel is another fascinating species that has been studied a lot more and, from the articles I've read, is known for its growing residency in cities around the United States.

Because I felt really conflicted choosing between the two, I decided to not choose. Both animal's behaviors are very different (for starters, the kestrel is diurnal and the owl is nocturnal and the kestrel is more "urbanized"), so Ms. Suits and I thought it would be more exciting to analyze the behaviors of each species and then compare. I'll go into more detail about this in my upcoming post.

So, what now? Since I've finally chosen my two subjects of study, I need to go through the files of the rest of the year and find any patterns or distinctions as to why these species are brought in. I'm slightly terrified as this will mean going through a lot more paper, but oh well. On a brighter note, I've been delegated with more responsibility as I was the only person in the room when someone came in with an animal, so I had to learn how to do intake (which is the process of filling out forms with information about the animal and the someone who brought it) and then was able to help with primary check-up.

Well, that's it for now. I just wanted to give you guys that quick update because I know everyone has been waiting to know which animal I chose. I'll see you again guys sometime this week, so be prepared!

Bye... for now

Now as Busy as a Bee

Whoa, look, I'm back!

Hello again, people. Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post: I didn't know that many people could care that much about something I do, but now that I have that knowledge, I will make my life even more entertaining for you.

Let me start off by saying, this week has been weird. The increase in sleep and the decrease in homework have really confuzzled my stress-o-meter; my body and brain felt bored and dead from the lack of labor. But, worry not, because I was soon able to find relief in Liberty Wildlife. I just started my first week, and this place is amazing.

In all its glory

When I first arrived, I was given another tour, led by my on-site supervisor Carol Suits, that focused more on where I'd be working. I got a door-opening badge thing and my own personal desk where everyone can see me, both of which make me super official:

It's a desk! 

I was given the opportunity to hold this little baby pigeon. It was adorably well-behaved and liked to make little cooing noises at me.

It's a bird!

I then walked through the rehab center, where I saw the "foster parent" ("foster parent" here means that these owls are kept in order to raise infant owls that may come in) Barn Owls and Great Horned Owls. 

It's two more slightly angry-looking birds!

After that, I settled in and began my research on which species of bird I should study while at Liberty. Jan Miller, the Animal Care Coordinator, and Ms. Suits were both extremely helpful and suggested I begin with raptors like the Great Horned Owl, Red-Tailed Hawk, and American Kestrel, while maybe even looking into some "backyard birds," like the common dove or pigeon. After a few hours or so, Jim, my neighbor desk buddy, suggested I look into the new Arizona invasive species of the Peach-Faced Lovebirds, who are apparently slowly conquering Scottsdale and southern Phoenix.

The face of evil!

My second day at Liberty was a lot more mellow. I walked in with my fancy new badge and immediately began my research again. About half an hour later, I decided I was done sitting and began organizing a bunch of records from last year into some filing cabinets. This was very helpful as about two hours later, I needed to access those files to learn which animals were brought and why. So, I spent another good two hours making a Google Sheets with shorthand records of all the potential birds I could study. By the end of it, everything looked really pretty (maybe I'll have some graphs on my next post) and I felt complete. But not everything was just paper. I was also able to meet some more of the animals that Liberty has at the moment. Here's a little prairie dog named Carl, just begging for some treats:

Rar

So, that concludes my first week working at Liberty Wildlife. For all of you wondering which species I've chosen, you'll have to keep wondering. Sorry. I'll wonder with you. I'm definitely a lot closer to choosing than before (all those species I mentioned are definite options), but there's still a bit more files for me to go through, especially concerning the Red-Tailed Hawk and American Kestrel.

Before I end, I'd like to talk about our star animal of the week: the llama!
                                                                                                                 

Hi, I'm a llama.

     



Now, this vote personally made me very happy as I am of Peruvian descent, which means the llama (native to Peru) is basically family. So, fun fact: we all heard about how llamas spit if they get agitated. Apparently, the llama will also stick out its tongue at an aggravating llama or human to express its annoyance to the world. You may have already known that, but I thought it was pretty hilarious since I also tend to stick my tongue out at those who irritate me (you see, we really are family). If you aren't impressed by that fact, then I can also mention that their fibers are fireproof, so now you can play with fire, kids! (I'm kidding, never play with fire unless you're a professional fire-player.)

Well, that was more or less a very long post with many pictures and gifs, so congrats if you were able to make it to the end. Your prize: a sense of accomplishment.

Have a nice life, and don't run with scissors.

Goodbye Llamas