The Wilds (part 1)

Right now I'm in the middle of my externship at The Wilds (www.thewilds.org) in no-where-ville Ohio. Besides not having cell phone reception or internet at the house, it's AMAZING!! Basically, this place has exotic/foreign Asian/African wildlife (like rhinos, camels, zebras, and many many bovids, cervids, equids and some cranes tossed in for effect)--so yeah, it's kind of like a zoo, but the cool thing is all these animals are out on PASTURE!!! The whole place is about 10,000 acres with a portion of that fenced in for these animals to pretty much roam where they want. It's so cool to see herds of Takin, Banteng or Bactrian deer roaming on hilly pasture.

That's me in the blue wisconsin shirt (head cut off) *trying* to be helpful while we immobilized a bison so we could trim his feet.


I'll try to post more pics as i take them (I just didn't want to be "that vet student who always takes pictures) so i'm keeping the camera on a low profile...

Besides working on awesome animals (and finally starting to not hate large animal medicine!) I got to go out "hellbender-ing". Hellbenders are basically BIG salamanders that live under flat rocks in the southern/eastern Ohio creeks. See the pic to the right-->

They are endangered so researchers go out, walk through the creeks lifting big flat rocks, hoping to find a hellbender and then chase it into one of many nets that we hold around said rock. Then the researchers weigh it, measure it, put a microchip it in and note any abnormalities. If we (vet staff from the wilds) are along, we swab it for fungus (a specific fungus that is a huge problem in frogs or salamanders...dang, now i can't remember...) and a specific virus that attacks amphibians. Then we take a blood sample and let the hellbender go back under the rock:) It's a lot of fun and since the weather is sort of hot, walking through the cold creek (where the flies and mosquitos don't bug you) is awesome.