And now for something completely different

At first I though this must be some kind of bison, but it's actually a muskox.

There used to be herds of muskoxen across Alaska, Arctic Canada, and Greenland, but the Alaskan population was wiped out by the early 20th century. They've since been reintroduced in several of the parks and wildlife refuges.

It's too bad the sun was behind her (I think this is a female) so I couldn't get better pictures of this very strange creature.

Another youngster

This is a young elk.

Plus a moose!

Most of the moose I saw in Alaska were at a distance, so I couldn't appreciate that strange squarish snout they have. This moose at the AWCC was a juvenile—old enough to have been abandoned by its mother, but not old enough to have turned into an asshole.

But it turns out I had more reindeer

I found a folder, cleverly named AWCC, that I had clearly never investigated. So here are some more pictures of the reindeer.

Flashback: Alaska

I posted some pictures from the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center back in 2014 when I visited it, but I somehow ignored this disconcerting creature.

Reindeer are not native to Alaska; as in South Georgia, they were originally imported as a food source. Alaska Native populations were starving because the whaling industry was disrupting their traditional food supplies, and arrangements were made to bring in reindeer from Russia to supplement the increasingly scarce caribou. Reindeer and caribou are the same species, but different subspecies, and since all of the reindeer in Alaska are semidomesticated, a century and a half of breeding has increased the visible differences between them.

There are fewer than 20,000 reindeer left in Alaska, and by law only Alaska Natives are allowed to keep them.

If I ever knew how these two ended up in the AWCC, I've long since forgotten it. Perhaps they needed rehab to learn to walk with those ridiculous antlers on their heads? They remind me of Max the dog in the original cartoon of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Felicia

Sadly, I do not have a picture of Felicia—she was hiding behind some plants in her cage, and all I could see was a vague spotty shadow. But even without a picture her story is worth telling.

Felicia is an ocelot, and was brought to the Toucan Rescue Ranch when the drug dealer who was keeping her as a pet was arrested, and the police found her sitting on the couch in his apartment. Because she was still very young, it was hoped she could be rehabilitated and returned to the wild.

The first problem they noticed was that she wasn't going to the bathroom. She had been trained to use a litter box, and refused to go without one. So they put a litter box in her cage and she used it happily.

The most important skill for living in the wild is obviously being able to feed yourself, and so next they put a chicken in her cage to see if she would hunt it. The first day she was scared of the chicken and hid, but by the third day she had made friends with it. 

So Felicia will also be spending the rest of her life at the ranch, using a litter box and refusing to kill her dinner.

Snack time

This sloth is named Latte, and she investigated this potential snack very very slooooowly, before deciding that it met with her approval.

Let sleeping sloths lie

Who knew sloths were so adorable? I certainly didn't, and I have actually seen sloths in the wild, in Panama. Those were basically big brown motionless furballs way up in the trees, and not at all cute, as opposed to this little guy, Milo, and his friends at the Toucan Rescue Ranch outside San José.

Yesterday was our only unscheduled day, and several of us went to the ranch for a tour. We got to see toucans, monkeys, and other wildlife in addition to the sloths. Some of them had been pets; some were injured by cars or power lines. Because the goal is to return as many of the animals to the wild as possible, human contact needs to be limited, and you can only see the animals who for one reason or another can't be rehabilitated. (One poor spider monkey for example was kept as a pet by an owner who cut off her prehensile tail to keep her from grabbing things with it.) 

It takes two years to teach a sloth to live in the wild, and those, like Milo, who fail to graduate will continue to live at the ranch with yummy snacks and blankets to keep them warm for naps.

A token acknowledgement of the existence of other elephants

A few more pictures from the elephant farm.

More Sampa

After her strenuous exercise, Sampa got water (I held a hose over one of the nostrils in her trunk; after a few minutes she put her trunk in her mouth and sprayed the water into it. Most of the water -- I also got a fair amount of it, which I suspect she found amusing.) 

And then some bamboo. Her trunk is amazingly dextrous; she held each stalk of bamboo and stripped the leaves off, then snapped the stalk into two pieces and stuffed them in her mouth.

Me and my Sampa

I think Sampa would have preferred to stay near the alfalfa rather than going for a walk with what was probably just the latest in a long line of besotted tourists, but she was good-natured about it (though occasionally just stopping on the path and looking around and refusing to be nudged, just because she could.)

There were several elephants walking ahead of us so the path was occasionally festooned with droppings and I found it fascinating how Sampa avoided stepping in any of them. You wouldn't imagine that a creature so large could be so graceful, but she stepped delicately around without slowing down, occasionally veering off the path and then back on again if there was a particularly large pile in her way.

Oh I just don't know where to begin

I have spent three very long days seeing a tiny portion of northern India, and I think it will take me weeks to untangle my thoughts about it (not to mention the hundreds of pictures.)

After a five-hour drive back from Agra last night, through a thunderstorm that reduced visibility on the already scary Indian roadways to near zero, I'm not up for anything complicated. Or energetic.

So here's something easy: my new friend Sampa. She's a rescue elephant, who after decades of carrying tourists up and down the hills from the Amber Fort, is now living in elephant luxury on a farm called, appropriately enough, Elefantastic, an hour or so outside Jaipur. I got to spend an afternoon feeding and watering and walking with her and several of her friends, and it was wonderful. She's gentle and funny and a little bossy -- I was feeding her bundles of bamboo wrapped in alfalfa and she kept nudging me out of the way with her head trying to sneak extra alfalfa.

Sunday bird blogging

A closeup of Adonis and his eagle eyes.

Another excuse for baby talk

I couldn't get a better picture but I have to include this guy anyway: a young moose, left orphaned, being raised at the center.

Adonis

That's the appropriate name for this handsome fellow.

He's been living at the center for almost twenty years, since he had to have one of his wings amputated after having been shot.

Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center

The AWCC takes in injured and orphaned animals, and gives a permanent home to those that can't be released into the wild.

And it was odd, but I had a very mixed reaction to this. I love animals, and I would rescue every animal orphan on the planet if I could. But it was jarring to suddenly see them -- I almost wrote "behind bars" -- in enclosures. This mama elk and her calf are lucky; they're scheduled for release next year. And I could never personally allow an animal to die just because some idiot tried to keep it as a pet, which was the case with several of the animals here. But I hated to see them in captivity, and it had never bothered me so much before.

I think I've got Alaska in the blood now.