11/05/2012

This morning, while Lisette and me were doing spot checks and started to clean the owls cage, this means raking up all the feathers, taking out the bowl that was left there from the previous days feeding, with the 1^st years, we found a dead chicken under one of the trees. Most of the chicken was eaten up but the feathers were all still lying there. We think that this may be Savanna (female serval) that escaped a few days ago from her cage with Bacardi(Male serval).

Savanna wasn’t hand raised when we got her so she still had her natural instinct to hunt for herself. Because she has been in the wild life centre for so long she knows that there is food here. If she was hungry this would be the first place that she would return to. The chickens were easy food to catch because Paulina (worker that cleans around the Wild Life Centre) usually puts the chickens back into their enclosure in the evenings to protect them from being caught during the night. Except this night Paulina wasn’t there to place them back into their cage and the rest of us forgot about them.

When the chickens sleep they are at their most vulnerable and it was easy prey for Savanna to catch. Because they are mostly nocturnal animals this was the time she would be searching food.

We have an enclosure where the Kudus (Dandy- female and Houdini- male) and Zena-female Oryx Gazelle, sleep and stay during the day. This enclosure has a bonnox fence that is too small for them to fit through so that they might escape, but what happened was, when we were still bringing them in during the night so that they could be warmer inside because they were still small babies, it was quite hard to catch Houdini and Dandy because they weren’t used to being caught and it is their natural instinct to run when someone is chasing them, so we would be a few people that tried to get him into a corner so that there would be no way for him to go. The result of this was that sometimes they would jump into the fence itself to get away from the people moving closer to him as he would see it as the only escape route. They don’t notice the fence because it doesn’t have any covering like netting over it so that they can see the fence so when their stressing they would try and go right through it.

This resulted in the fence wire being bent or the holes in the bonnox being made a lot bigger, or the wire even breaking. There was a lot or loose wires sticking out through the fence that could hurt the animals in the enclosure itself, or the animals passing the enclosure that are free roaming in the wild life centre or even the people and guests passing the enclosure can get stuck on the wires. Me and Gunter bent over the loose pieces of wire to make it safer for the meantime. We tried to move the wire back to the place that it was to make the holes the same size as it was but the wire was damaged too much. Once the one hole was back to its original size, another hole would be bigger than it should be.

We called Daniel (worker) to come fix the wire properly with adding other pieces of wire and by using the proper equipment.

A different approach than bottle feeding

Tried to teach the serval kittens to drink their milk out of a bowl rather than bottles with teats. They ( Lauren, Karen) decided to try this because when we were feeding them with the bottle they were just chewing the teat that we tried to feed them with and not suckling properly.

We also changed their milk from Esbilac puppy milk replacer to a mixture called lion milk. It contains egg yolk, milk, cream, gelatine and cooking oil. The amounts of each ingredient vary according to the amount of milk you want to make. We had to change them from Esbilac to the new milk because we were running out of Esbilac and Esbilac is really expensive when brought from the veterinarian.

What we did was pour the amount of milk that each of them had to get into one single bowl. It was then a process that requires a lot of patients and determination. You first have to show them the bowl, sometimes they just want to run away. Another problem that we had was keeping them near the bowl. Because they were still kept in a small cage inside they just want to play the minute we take them out of the cage.



Introducing the kittens to the milk



Apollo not being really interested in the milk

Trying it but rather just want to play with it

After introducing them to the milk in the bowl we would dab our fingers into the milk and onto their mouth. Every time we did this you would bring your finger closer to the bowl so that they move closer and closer to the milk. Oryn licked the milk up a few times but he pushed his whole nose into the milk and this resulted in it going up his nose. He sneezed a few times and didn’t want to drink the milk any more.

Apollo tried a few times but wasn’t really interested in drinking the milk, he just wanted to play.

On night shift Lisette still had to feed them out of the bottle so that they would still get their nutrition and enough food in because they didn’t drink all the milk that they were suppose to that day.

We will try everyday to see if they get better at drinking out of a bowl.

Just another day at work

: What: We didn’t have a feeding tour this morning so we prepared the food with the new students that came in on Wednesday. They were still new with most of the things so we helped them.

After feeding we did spot-checks with the 1^st years. We placed new grass in Cookie(large spotted genet) cage and cleaned the corners of the cage where she always defecates.

We placed new grass with the small tortoises and new grass in the peregrine falcon cage. They cleaned the caracals dam and picked up all the feathers that was left over from the chickens that they were fed the previous day.

I gave Oryn (serval kitten) antibiotics because of the blood that he had in his faeces. It was given Sub cutaneous (under his skin).

We placed the kittens outside for a while in the cage where the bush baby sleeps so that they can get out of the small cage that they’re in all day. They really enjoyed playing around in the grass and on the tree stumps that is in there. It was good for them to get out for a while. It will be better to find a cage that we can place them in during the day because the cage that they are in now is too small and their growing quickly now. The kittens are becoming more active and more playful and they get frustrated in the small cage. The only worry that there was for placing them in the bigger cages was that we had to remove all the branches that was in the cage. They start climbing on everything and they don’t really have good balance yet. It is a big possibility that they will fall off the branches and can get seriously hurt.

I went to town to fetch the lion cubs. Karen took them to the veterinarian in the morning for a check up and because they both got diarrhoea. The vet said that they had Coccidiosis, and prescribed them some antibiotics and dewormer. They also placed the younger lion cub on a drip because she was dehydrated, not eating and really flat (not having any energy). Hey placed dextrose in her drip. They had to place a stick next to where the drip goes into her vein to prevent her paw from pulling back the whole time. If she pulls her leg against her body the whole time the drip stops running and this results in the drip being clogged up. We had to check the drip every half hour to make sure that she wasn’t lying on it which would result in the drip not running anymore. We had to place her in a small cage under the red light so that she would still keep her normal temperature and not get cold but could only move around in a restricted space and not pull out her gelco and to prevent the other lion cub from chewing on the drip line.

One of the 1^st years brought a baby Impala in that he found on the service road. She got hurt on the inside of her leg. We cleaned the wound with SOS disinfectant even though it wasn’t that bad.

We mixed “Springbokkie mix” milk for her which consists of 120ml full cream, 1.5 L milk and 6 egg yolks. She drank half of the 50ml that we gave her but she was stressed out a lot and we (Me and Lisette) had to catch her in the outside boma where we placed her with “Lilo”, the Steenbok that we have. She was jumping up against the walls until we caught her quickly.



Baby Impala that was brought in




Drip that was in the lion cub