Hi, everyone! Welcome back to Animal Wonders. I’m Jessi,
and this Kizmit the African crested porcupine. Kizmit has had quite an interesting week,
and so have many animals and zookeepers across the United States.
We had an extreme cold front come through that put the lives of some of our animals at risk.
So what happens when the weather gets so cold it’s life threatening? How do we keep the animals safe?
Let me show you what we did.
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For many of the states, like Texas and Oklahoma, who rarely have to
deal with freezing temperatures, the unusual extreme cold, major storms, and power outages
has been a very serious undertaking. The zookeepers were faced with major
challenges trying to keep their animals warm. They got creative and saved the lives of
thousands of animals. So well done to all
the hard working animal keepers who are so dedicated to the wellbeing of their charges!
Unfortunately, extreme weather can be a really challenging issue, and not all of the animals
survived, which is why we take it so seriously. Now, in Montana, unpredictable and extreme
weather happens quite frequently. Sub zero temperatures, blizzards,
and power outages are so common that it’s one of the biggest challenges to having
an exotic animal rescue in Montana. Especially when providing care for species
that come from desert or tropical habitats. Which is why we have seasonal changes to
our daily animal tasks and cold weather protocols ready to implement as needed.
We’ve actually been having a really mild winter so far, with temperatures staying between 15
and 40 degrees F and just a small scattering of snow covering the ground in many places.
This isn’t normal for a Montana winter, but it has been nice since we have a few new enclosures
and new animals who are sensitive to extreme cold. Because of this mild winter weather, we’ve been
able to test out how the heating systems are working and where we need to make improvements.
So, when we saw the alerts about a winter storm warning, we knew it was time to put
our cold weather protocols into action! First, we needed to move all the animals
that were most vulnerable into areas where our tried and true heating
systems keep everyone safe and comfortable. This includes animals like Kizmit the porcupine.
Kizi is currently living in one of our new buildings, and it’s been great because she
has plenty of space and it’s generally been staying warm enough for her over this winter.
But when the temperature fell under -10 degrees F, this space dropped under 60 degrees F,
and with even colder temperatures predicted, we didn’t feel comfortable leaving her in this room.
So Kizmit was loaded into her crate and moved into the main building for temporary housing
so we could safely ride out the storm. Now, Kizi is a giant rodent with giant
rodent teeth, and she can easily and quickly chew right through a wall.
Housing her in a temperature controlled indoor space is challenging!
So she went into the only room in the main building
that has walls that she can’t chew through. But that happens to be currently housing
our trio of rabbits, which means the rabbits needed to move out.
So they moved into Sydney the bettong’s habitat during the day while Sydney,
who is nocturnal, slept in her cozy sleeping pouch inside her familiar travel crate.
Then at night, we switched the rabbits into their travel crates to sleep overnight,
and Sydney got the space for her nighttime activities. It might sound complicated, but it works great
as a temporary solution for a few days. So with Kizmit safely secured in a warm space,
we moved on to her winter roommate, Sprite the guinea turaco.
Sprite is fairly cold tolerant and is comfortable in temperatures down to about 40 degrees F.
So, she just needed to be moved into a crate for the two nights that it
was predicted to get below -20 degrees F. She doesn’t enjoy being in small spaces,
so as soon as it was safe in the morning, she was let out of the crate back into the room
to run and hop around on her branches. Our next challenge was keeping Hara our
Harris’s hawk from getting too cold, which could lead to frostbite on her feet or wings.
Harris’s hawks are desert birds and don’t have adaptations to help them survive in
freezing temperatures like many of our native hawk species we have in Montana.
But Hara has been living at Animal Wonders since 2012, and with a few precautions,
she’s now a pro at tolerating whatever weather comes at us. But that doesn’t
mean we can completely leave her to it. Hara has two heated perches that she can
choose to sit on whenever she wants. One is in the main space of her mews,
and the other is inside a wooden den box with a ceramic heat emitter over top.
She can sit under the heater whenever she wants, but that doesn’t mean that she’s completely safe.
See, hawks don’t have good night vision, so once they’ve perched for the night,
they won’t move from that spot for fear of crashing into branches that they can’t see in the dark.
Which means if there’s a major temperature drop at night and she hasn’t chosen to perch in the
heated area, she’s at risk of getting too cold. So our protocol for her is when the temperature
is predicted to get below -10 degrees F, we’ll go in and make sure she’s safe.
If she isn’t already in her box, we move her onto the heated perch and close the doors of
her heated box to wait out the cold. The only downside to this is that she
ends up pooping all over the box, and since everything is frozen, cleanup sometimes has
to wait until things thaw out enough to scrub. Thankfully, the really dangerous part of the
cold snap was short, and Hara only needed to be moved into her heated box for two nights.
And since she’s proven to be quite smart about keeping warm during the day, we opened up the door
and she had access to her full space each morning. And our last major challenge was for a new animal
that recently came to live at Animal Wonders: Gwendolyn the turkey vulture.
This is Gwen’s first winter in Montana, so she’s not as savvy as Hara about keeping herself warm.
So even though she has heated areas in her home, we didn’t feel completely comfortable
leaving her to her own devices. And since we don’t have a fully built
indoor area for her, we moved her into the main building in the only available space large enough
to keep her happy: right in the hallway. Which was a really interesting experience
for both us and her. It was really fun watching
all of her unique behaviors, and we’re really getting to know her better.
So that meant all of the cold sensitive animals were accounted for,
but that still left a lot to do. We turned up the heaters in all the main indoor rooms
and turned down the ventilation systems. Then we turned up the air purifiers to keep the
animals’ natural dust and dander under control. Next we gave all the native species living in
outdoor spaces extra bedding, double checked their dens to make sure they were secure and the animals
could make them cozy, and ensured their heated water bowls were properly secured and functioning.
Lollipop the skunk is getting older, so she’s now getting a heat pad under part of her den box,
so we made sure it was working and she was warm and happy.
Ringo the racoon got fresh blankets to pile into his house since he had recently pulled
all of them into his water for who knows what reason! Raccoons are trouble makers.
Also, Ringo’s daily dumping of his water dish has created a big berm of solid ice around his bowl
that’s threatening to block the door. So we’ll need to figure out how to prevent
that from happening in the future. Then we installed a heat bulb
over one of the ravens’ perches to give them the option to sit under it if they wanted to.
And that left us with Huckleberry the beaver. Now, with Huckleberry comes even more challenges.
His need for a large pool of fresh water every day combined with freezing
temperatures creates a unique situation. And we’ve thought about this a lot, especially
while we were planning the construction of his building and we put the pool in.
So his home has an outdoor yard, but his pool is completely indoors, so we can keep
it and the filter pipes from freezing solid by using just a small wall heater.
Now most of the time, we can keep the indoor space just above freezing with the
windows open to allow for nice air flow. So during the cold snap, Huckleberry was
completely unphased by the cold and carried on doing his beaver business.
And since we weren’t worried about him tolerating the cold, we made one little
mistake. We didn’t close the windows, and the water ended up freezing in his pipes.
Luckily, the pipes didn’t break, but it did make it very hard to clean out his pool for a few days.
Of course, we’d do anything for Huckleberry, but I’ve got to give a huge shout out to Taylor
and Augusto for taking on cleaning beaver poop water in sub zero weather! It’s no easy task.
When extreme weather comes unexpectedly, it can be devastating. I want to send
out my deepest condolences to all of the animal caretakers who are grieving a loss
due to the cold or the power outages. I’m incredibly thankful to have a great
animal keeper team and solid plans in place, even if everything isn’t completely perfect.
Overall this cold blast was challenging, but it wasn’t more than we could handle.
It came with some known tasks and it presented some new hurdles,
but we’ve made it through and we’ve come out with good ideas for what needs to be worked on!
We’re going to figure out how to keep Kizmit the porcupine’s room
warmer even in extreme cold temperatures. We’re going to build Gwendolyn the vulture an
indoor space that she can go into when she’s cold. We’re going to figure out how to keep Ringo
the raccoon from creating ice sculptures in the front of his door.
And we’re going to not forget to close Huckleberry the beaver’s windows when it gets 20°F below.
We won’t be able to make any real progress on some of these things until spring comes, but I’m
looking forward to tackling those improvements so we’re even more prepared for next winter.
Thanks for going on this journey with us! Every day is an adventure at Animal Wonders.
And if you’d like to continue going on adventures, please be sure to subscribe and I’ll see you soon! Bye!
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