I just returned from a family vacation to Yellowstone National Park, so I thought I’d share some pics of the cool wildlife we were able to see. What a beautiful part of our country! Click on the pics to see them better. Bison (also referred to as buffalo) This guy is shedding out. Bison are herbivores that can weigh in between 900 and 2100 pounds! They are massive. Mountain Bluebird (he and his mate were delivering bedding and bugs toRead more
Posts tagged: #museum
Honeycomb to the bears
I mentioned that I would be offereing the bears honey taken from a bee hive at my house. Thursday morning we put out the honeycomb in the bear exhibit. The bears immediately started sniffing the air as if they knew of the goldmine they were about to find. Mimi and Virginia wandered the deadfall. Virginia made her way up the limb and found one of the pieces of honeycomb we put out, as seen in the photos below. She lickedRead more
Big Words of the Month: Alopecia and Depilation
Alopecia and depilation are big words that refer to hair loss. Depliation is the intentional removal of hair using mechanical or chemical means, while alopecia refers to hair loss due to physiological processes. During the spring and summer there is a lot of hair loss going on at the museum . Many wild animals shed out of a winter coat into a sleeker, cooler summer coat. Our red wolves are transitioning from thick coat to a thin coat and canRead more
Honeycomb big, yeah yeah yeah!
It’s a long story, but I’ll make it short. I have had a hive of honey bees living in my house. Not in areas where you could see them, just hear them: in the ceiling above the bathroom and below my daughter’s bedroom floor. Yesterday, Bee Keepers came to my house to remove the hive. It was really really interesting. You can see the section of ceiling cut out- about 12×24 inches. The bees are being vacuumed up by aRead more
Spotlight: Cassidy Walpole
A few weeks ago Kristen wrote a post about our new keeper, Cassidy. I first met Cassidy about 13 years ago when she started volunteering in the animal department. She was a great “youth partner”. So great, that in 1998 she was the Durham Volunteer Center’s Youth Volunteer of the Year and won the Governor’s Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service that same year. She went off to college, and my interaction with Cassidy was limited to providing references for her,Read more
Species Survival
Many of the posts on our blog have dealt in one way or another with red wolves. Keeper Marilyn has written a detailed series on the plight of the species and the efforts to reestablish it to the wild in North Carolina. Over the last 20 years the eastern North Carolina population has increased dramatically and has become a textbook example of reintroducing an extirpated species. Unfortunately, the only wild population of red wolves has been threatened by one ofRead more