Oakland Zoo Internship: Week 3

A lot of this week was routine again. Bob, the pygmy goat with kidney issues, now get fed 1/4 cup of his food mixed with water and salt 2-3 times a day to help him to drink water. He eats the whole thing with all the water happily. When feeding out lemur lunch we usually try to hand feed the two male ring tails some fruit because the females are higher ranked then them and tend to push them off the food. I also got to prepare a lot of diets by myself this week, now that I know what to do for them. On Friday, another dog, Macy, was also there to visit. She is one of Lily's friends and used to be there every Friday but hasn't been there for a while. Saturday was an interesting day. First, in the morning, the other intern and I found a hummingbird hanging from the rafters in the barn tangled in cobwebs. The other intern got it down and started to untangle it outside while I got some sugar water for it, however, by the time I got outside with the sugar water, the bird had already flown off. Shortly after that we discovered that we had a sick lemur, Anthony, one of the blue-eyed black lemurs was very lethargic and vomiting a lot. The vets came down to look at him and then took him up to the Veterinary Care Center. Later in the day we were told that he had gallstones. He is now on medications, both an antibiotic and a analgesic, pain reliever, and is kept inside with Eugine, the other blue-eyed black lemur during the day. Toward the end of the day, I picked up some weeds along the side of the driveway that the keeper had cut using the weed-whacker, which included some wild catnip, and a while later when I went in the cat room, one of the cats, Cali, hugged my side and kept rubbing her face on me because of the scent of the catnip, so we decided to get some of the catnip and bring it in to the cats. On Monday I spent most of the morning helping out in the contact yard. It was a very hot day and there were not too many people there and only a few medium sized school groups came.