Still no pups…

… but we’re hopeful. The female wolf is looking very large and doing lots of digging in one of the den areas. It’s hard to wait – nerve-wracking actually. Many staff wrote their guesses for birth date and number of pups born in the Red Wolf Puppy Pool in the staff lunch area.Read more

Bear Pool Cleaning Next Month

We fully drain and clean the bear pools twice each year (it used to be once each year but not anymore). Next month is time again. It is typically a very tiring, fun, fulfilling, frustrating, and dirty project. (Yes, all those words go together for this project). Below are photos of Autumn and Katie during the December cleaning process. If you want to see photos from previous bear pool cleanings, click here,  here, or here. We’ll try and get someRead more

Hoping for some wolf pups…

We’ve had a breeding pair of red wolves at the Museum for the past 6+ years… yet no pups. Back in 2011 some of us were very confident that pups were on the way. However, no pups then, and none of our pairings since 2002 have had pups. At last Summer’s Red Wolf SSP meeting, a new pair was made- a female-1858- was going to come from Chattanooga to live and hopefully breed with our male- 1784. Our new pairRead more

Saying Goodbye.

As many of you may know we lost our Red Ruffed matriarch, Cynthia, last spring. It was unexpected and a very hard loss for us keepers. However, she was 35 years old and had lived a great life. She had 17 offspring in her lifetime and was in the first generation of captive born Red Ruffed Lemurs. Iris, one of her two daughters that lived with her at the Museum, had been diagnosed with renal disease about 2 1/2 years ago.Read more

What you missed while we were away, Part 3

I’m not sure I can continue to use this header, but for now, it seemed appropriate: This past June, I said goodbye to my flip phone, and entered the modern era of Smart phones. You first learned of this in my Christmas 2016 post.  This past October, I not only got a video of Florian, but was able to send it to the Keepers. It was the first time anyone had seen Florian climbing, or walking on his platforms andRead more