Or: Hey! I can actually do work with this thing (kinda)!

Another week of constant camera carrying has concluded, chronicling my crazy week (I love alliteration!). This week I’ve learned a few things: 1) You take your camera home A LOT when you keep it in your pocket all the time 2) That’s not such a bad thing because you end up running into people who ask you if you work at the Museum (because you are still wearing your purple shirt), and it’s a great opportunity to show them super cute pictures of the animals, convincing them to a) visit the museum and b) visit the blog, 3) I take a lot of pictures of flowers and bugs 4) Our animals are pretty darn cute (I’ve always known this, but now I have proof!) and 5) I can actually do work with this thing!

For instance, here are the updated salamander identification sheet that I talked about in my last post. We got them as babies, and since they all live together in the first exhibit in Carolina Wildlife we wanted ways to tell them apart for their records and for things like seeing how much they were respectively eating. When they first came to us we took pictures of them and identified them by the spots on their heads. As they grew, it got harder and harder to tell them apart by those markings, and impossible by the other markings on their bodies. I noticed that the markings on their chins were very distinct from each other, and in fact looked a lot like facial hair. So here’s what I came up with:

Beard = The Salamander Formerly Known as Left Spot

Moustache = The Salamander Formerly Known as Two Spot

Goatee = The Salamander Formerly Known as Right Spot

I put helpful facial hair examples in case my fellow keepers were not so great with their facial hair identification OR their salamander identification (now they are excellent at both).

THEN I was up in the farmyard when a visitor pointed out that Lightning’s eye was swollen and weepy. Luckily I had a camera on me to take a picture of it in case the vet wanted to see what it looked like at its worst (we flushed his eye out and put some medicine in it and it was looking much better by the next day):

Buuuuuuut, mostly I just take pictures of flowers, bugs, and cute animals. Here’s some pretty flowers growing all around the deadfall in the bear yard:

Here’s a bee on the same type of flower in Catch the Wind:

Here’s Cassandra the Ring Tailed lemur totally high-fiving me (she was grabbing my hand because I was giving her some medicine-covered raisins, but it looks like a high five!):

And here’s a series of some really cute Virginia pictures that I took when I went to go feed the bears:

If you’re ever at one of the 2pm Meet the Keeper programs that I’m giving (they happen every day, and you can ask the front desk where they’ll be when you come in, or there’s a sign at the top of the boardwalk), make sure to ask to see what pictures I have on my camera. I usually have something cute on there.