The Wilds (part 3) and Hellbender-ing (part 2)

Knock on wood, The Wilds has been not that crazy of an externship. The case load is low, the free time is abundant and it’s mostly herd management. However, last week I had two “emergencies”.

First, a Bactrian Deer had been very pregnant for a very long time. Recently she had looked extra huge and had started to bag up. Last year, this same deer had a dystocia (difficult birth ---calf was born breech and she couldn’t have it, so they had to anesthetize her and pull it—calf was deadL but mom lived). With the history, we were anticipating another dystocia, so were watching her carefully.

It never fails. Friday afternoon right before we were about to pack it in for the night, Animal Management saw some discharge from her vulva. We went out there and couldn’t find the deer. After a good 30 min of systematically driving through the tall grasses, we found her hunkered down so far in the grasses, we almost ran over her. And sure enough, two little hooves were sticking out of her back end.

We went back to the clinic to prepare and Animal management herded her down to the “tamer” (like a squeeze shoot) where we gave her anesthetic drugs….after she went down in the induction stall, we pulled the calf (again breech, or caudal presentation) which was sadly dead. We medicated the deer and woke her up. She recovered well and looked fine. However she died overnightL The necropsy didn’t tell us why she died exactly. Sadness.

Later that week, all was quiet in the clinic. It was deemed a “paperwork” day to work on projects and get caught up on records. They day was jinxed from the start.

Around lunch time we found out that the male Takin (see pic) had gotten into a fight and one had gored the other’s eye. It was irrepairable so after lunch we anesthetized the Takin and performed an enucleation (surgically taking the eye out and sewing the skin over the eye socket). Luckily, everything went great; the Takin recovered fine and the eye is now healing beautifully! Here is a pic of me “expertly” giving the anesthetized Takin an injection while they remove the eye ball.

The other male Takin – the one who had done the goring—was lame so while we were there, we anesthetized him for radiographs. He had some weird abnormalities on the xrays, but no broken bones, so we woke him up and over the next few days his lameness disappeared. AwesomeJ

And of course, I got to do some more “hellbender-ing” while I’m hereJ yay! We caught 4 the first day, 3 the second day and 2 the third day. Not incredible numbers, but still great. I’ve been doing awesome at drawing blood from hellbenders (not so good from mudpuppies, but they are much smaller). The hellbenders we caught on the last day had this awesome yellow color to them ( see pic), and we also found a baby spiny soft shelled turtle (see pic)—very cute!!

In other good news, I have an interview Tuesday (of all days, I know…) at what seems like a great vet clinic, for an internship. An internship is a year long job working at a clinic for very little money in hopes of getting some great mentorship—this is AFTER graduation (next May). I plan to interview at a lot of places this summer and early fall, but it’s exciting to get started.

Ok, I think that’s all for now…I leave on Saturday (July 25^th) for Tuft’s Wildlife Clinic in MA!! Yay!

Take care and I’m thinking about you Grandpa!

p.s. I have to show this picture of a small store in the middle of nowhere-ohio. It's hard to see in the pic, but tes, the sign says “family market custom killing” without any separation of the two phrases.

Oh and they sell t-shirts with that same uninterrupted phrase “Family Market Custom Killing”

Of course I bought one!