Well, what an awful day, raining stair rods, gales and heavy hail. It's rather quiet when we open up on days like this as most of the animals and birds are in their holts, boxes or shelters keeping warm and dry; can't blame them really can you?
A quick chat and the four of us (keepers that is) get on with the day; the three priorities at this time of day are feeding and checking the animals, checking the fencing and grounds for overnight damage due to the weather and getting on top of our water. We have a beautiful site with its' own spring fed stream and numerous other springs but that can be a problem on mornings like today; water everywhere and if we don't control the early signs of flooding we'll be in trouble later.
During the checks we see that the four Asian Short Clawed cubs are all dry and snug in the holt. One is clearly smaller than the rest but they are all obviously putting on weight. The other thing we notice is that they are already changing colour from the clean, silver grey fur they were born with to a darker, slightly dirtier looking coat that they will wear for the next couple of weeks. Their eyes are still tight shut but they do squeak from time to time and are being well cared for by Zephyr and the rest of the gang. Have Tilly and Tiny been trying to suckle their younger brothers and sisters? Both have sore looking teats, we'll have to keep an eye on that as neither of them can make any milk for the cubs until they've had cubs of their own. The family remove most of their bedding during the morning which is their way to let us know they want to be cleaned out. We duly take away the dirty bedding they've left on their balcony and replace with fresh straw which is quickly stowed away in an impressive team effort by everyone except Zephyr, who was presumably organising things inside, out of our sight.
William and Hilda, a pair of British Otters, come out together and play for half an hour or so during the morning. A good sign, we'd like them to breed but they haven't been taking much notice of one another since they were placed in the same pen three weeks ago.
An hour and a half later we've cleaned, cleared and checked and all is well, floodwater receding and no big trees came down last night which means we can get on with more constructive jobs.
Mandy and I check on our pair of Bengal Eagle Owls; they had 7 eggs in their nest 10 days ago and we're curious to see if the female will sit as it's rather early to breed, even for this pair. We get a surprise when we look because now there are 8! Looks like owlets before Christmas if the eggs are fertile.
During the day we near the end of constructing a new aviary and noticed that the ducks were dabbling contendedly on the lawn now that it had stopped raining. What a pretty sight. Then reality hits home, within an hour the lawn was gone and had been replaced by a muddy bog occupied by 20 or so very contented looking ducks. Who's idea was it to buy in ducks? Oh well, at least they're happy....
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