you
Work ever. Hey guys. Hey, what's up? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Welcome to the stream. Welcome to the stream
Thank you all so much. Yes. Hello. I know I know we have a lot to talk about
We have a lot to talk about
Long story short though, we're not gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about another day because
There's a lot of there's a lot of story times
to be had. Okay, yeah, fairs. I wasn't going to stay in Alaska and then I got
freaking engaged and then we were like, we should just stay in Alaska because it's
so beautiful here and so that's what we did. And so it was just gonna be Conor
doing the stream here on the Alva S channel but I'm here. So now we're at
Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and I thought it made a ton of sense to go live on my own channel
to show you guys where some of your donations are going, or where all of your donations are going
from our Not Geo streams in Alaska because they're a huge success and I want you guys to
see this facility. I've never seen this facility either so we'll be doing a tour together and staff
here is super stoked they obviously know about the streams they know the fundraising that you guys
did we raised $46,000 for the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and so yeah today we're doing
we're doing the tour so you guys can see it and yeah bonus stream and yes I also got engaged and
I will tell you guys all about it either tomorrow or Tuesday when I'm back home.
Um, can we get a size comparison to see how big the mountain is behind you?
Maybe a ring might help put it in perspective.
Connor, give a little...
Alright, let's go.
I'll tell you guys about it later.
It's back.
It's so annoying.
That's so weird.
Okay
Oh my god.
Where's the wind muff?
This thing sucks.
Hello. Hello. We're live.
Oh my gosh.
You know what?
No wind muff for you. Sorry.
Alright guys.
We're here at the Alaska Wildlight Conservation Center with Becky and Christina.
Do you guys want to introduce yourselves to them?
Sure.
My name is Becky Champlis.
Director of Development at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and I get to
do the fundraising and grant writing and fun stuff that comes with running a
very large sanctuary. And I'm Christina Rogers, I'm the natural supervisor here at
the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and I get to hang out with a lot of
porcupines and help oversee our education department and connect people
to the really wonderful residents that live here. So cool and what do we
have planned today. Today, we're gonna do a whole bunch of stuff. We're gonna go on a tour of the
sanctuary, see as many critters as we can. We're gonna meet one of our very wonderful North American
porcupines. His name is Heath. He is a wonderful creature. We're also gonna be able to feed our
resident brown bears a little bit of their morning diet, get them some breakfast out to them,
and then hopefully meet a couple of our smallest, most newly addition residents to our sanctuary
here. So cool. Thank you. Amazing. All right. All right. I can hold that and I'll get back to you.
Cool. And Connor, I know you talked about it a little bit. Connor's care of manning, guys.
You talked about it a little bit. Can you say the significance of this place to you?
Hello. AWCC, I was going to be an Army veterinarian before I came to AWCC
and I fell in love with the wildlife here in 2014 and decided to change, I was an
intern, summer intern, I decided to change everything that I was gonna do and
decided to do more wildlife than veterinary stuff. Met my wife here and
this is where like it started everything for me so that's really cool to be
able to come back and get back to it's it's really cool.
Guys now Max is camera manning. Look at this. This is awesome.
He's got a kid on his back. Oh it's awesome. We're gonna see if they'll take my kid as one of their
attractions. Oh sweet. Amazing. All right and then we also have an honorary starling holder.
New edition of the stream. We got K-loads everybody.
Okay, all right, we'll follow your lead.
You want to take this?
Meet it.
Meet it, okay.
I figured we could sneak down this way first to see some big critters and we'll head back
behind the shop for all our community's ready.
Sweet.
What's the acreage in this facility?
In total, it's around 200 acres.
Okay.
We have another about 30 acres or so where we keep our full wood bison.
so the biggest animals in our care and they're off exhibit but for folks that
can roam about 200 acres for our animals here. Anywhere around 150 individuals in
our care at any given time. Wow. Can I just click this on you?
Absolutely. Sorry guys I was holding it. Yes the Starling
is my fiancee everybody okay guys look you know what this is chat seen a few
seen a few bears recently a little different though yeah we didn't see
any of these this is gonna be our first stop here this is co-buck he is a 10
year-old black bear in our care and he's got his sniffer going that open and
closing his mouth trying to smell as much as he can. He's originally from
Valdez, Alaska. He was a food conditioned bear so that means he was getting into
people's foods and dumpsters. Him and his mom were food conditioned. It's
really easy for bears to learn to get food from people rather than from
the wild. And on top of that it's thought that his mom was actually ran
off by somebody's dogs because they were spending so much time around people so he didn't really
stand a very good chance of surviving on his own in the wild at that time. He was just an
anybody baby in 2016 so as a preventative measure the state of Alaska actually brought him into
human care and he has lived a really silly 10 years with us here. He has a big personality
you can see he's got a bunch of trees in his habitat. He's a big tree climber.
He's also what we call a baton twirler, so we give him old Christmas trees that folks donate to us and he'll strip the pine needles off, he'll strip the extra branches off, and he'll twirl it around like the world's most adorable cheerleader in the world.
That's so cool. Connor, can you get this magpie really quick? This is just really cute.
What did you say his name was the bear?
Cobuck.
Cobuck, a silly bear, we heard.
And we do naming themes for our animals every year, so every year we'll pick a theme.
We have folks on our socials suggest themes that they would like, and then once we pick
a theme, every animal that's born comes into our care that year will have a name
according to the theme.
So I believe Cobuck's year was National Parks and Monuments, so Cobuck Valley
National Park up in Northern Alaska.
Where his name comes from?
Very cool.
Chat, if you have any questions, by the way, I can relay them out here.
I live in Alaska. Very cool!
Magpies are silly birds. Yeah, this is very cute.
Max is catching up a storm. As per you, she is.
Magpies hoping that he can get some scraps from the coba.
It's really common to see birds follow around, even wild bears,
because bears are pretty messy eaters and they can be picky,
So they'll leave a lot of food behind.
It's a great way for birds to come in and scavenge.
So, Philbuck has a lot of wild bird friends
that hang out in his habitat.
They're asking about his diet
and what his favorite food is.
Oh, great question.
So, bears are omnivores.
They get a pretty 50-50 split of produce
and raw protein in our care.
So, he'll get a lot of celery, lettuce,
sweet potatoes, apples, pears, grapes,
and berries for protein.
Most of his protein is going to be raw salmon,
but he can even get red meat, like bison meat
or moose meat that folks will donate our way.
His favorite food is like an extra special treat
that he gets.
His favorite food is peanut butter.
He doesn't get it every day,
but sometimes we'll put special things in there
with a little bit of peanut butter here,
a little bit of peanut butter there.
He also really likes hazelnuts.
So he gets some extra special enrichment treats
every once in a while.
Yeah, so they've got the red flashing on them. We call them climb guards because he's a phenomenal climber. All black bears are really good at climbing. That's kind of what they're taught to do when they're really, really little.
And most of them don't really grow out of it that much, especially for him.
Some of the trees are a little too close to the fence line for our comfort, for him to climb, this one in particular, and also to protect the trees.
So you'll see there's all these old logs in here. If we were to let him climb every single tree every day, probably by, you know, the next five to ten years he would have some fallen trees in his habitat.
So in order to keep as many trees in there as possible we like to have the climb guards on but we gave him two trees that he very frequently will go up and snooze in.
He might start twirling this stick so I'm going to give him a second to sniff it out. Yeah he's thinking about it.
He's got a couple in there so he might just try and find the right one.
It is kind of a beat of physics.
It always looks like bears are going to fall when they're sleeping in trees.
There's kind of like a U shaped saddle up in that tree that he'll plop his behind in and he'll have.
I've seen him like all four of his paws hanging down and he's snoozing.
He's got really great balance.
He's thinking about it.
He's just going to keep moving that stick around.
One chatter asked if he has a preference for being crunchy or creamy peanut butter.
That's a great question.
I don't think he's ever gotten crunchy peanut butter.
So as far as he knows, all peanut butter is creamy in his world.
Sapphire, thank you for the $100 donation.
We do have Twitch charity running still.
What a cute guy.
Do you know how much he weighs?
He is, I want to say roughly 300 pounds.
He's kind of right in the middle for an average male Alaskan
black bear.
Our other black bears, particularly our other male, has quite a bit of weight on him.
The largest wild black bears I've seen in Alaska could probably push up to around 500
pounds.
So he's kind of right in the middle there.
And he has some special markings on him.
So black bears are not always black sometimes.
They can be brown or there's even like a blue variation or there can be white black
bears even.
And he's got those two tan dots right above his eyeballs.
They don't always have that.
and they don't always have that tan nose.
And if you saw while he was walking back,
or we can try and see it when he's on his way back here,
he's got that white V on his chest that's called a blaze.
And it's kind of like an individual marking on black bears.
They don't always have them.
Sometimes they're really big.
I once saw a wild black bear mom
that had a heart-shaped blaze on her chest
and he's got like a nice long V there.
What kinds of enrichment do you guys do here?
He gets a really wide variety of enrichment.
All of our animals get enrichment to certain levels
based on their individual personalities.
He's a very brave bear, he's very confident.
So he gets a pretty wide variety of enrichment.
We actually run a public encounter
where folks can come and make enrichment for him
and give it to him, which is really cool.
But we'll make pinatas and stuff it with salmon,
guts and grapes and peanut butter and honey
and all things that bears love
and we'll hang them in the tree.
Yeah, or we'll even put fur in there from other animals
or like keepers dogs will bring their fur in
if they're brushing their dog out at home
and let him sniff around and try and find it in his habitat.
So anything that he can see or touch or sniff
or anything that's being changed around in his habitat
to engage his senses,
we kind of consider in that enrichment category.
Sorry.
Good questions, guys.
Yeah, those are phenomenal.
Good questions.
Keep them coming.
Thanks, thank you
Someone also asked if
Pretty cool
Well pass by and briefly again. We'll kind of do a loop-de-loop back here. We'll go see some other fan favorites
Also, I think you know this but when I'm staring at my phone, I'm reading the chat. I'm not just like ignoring
to stand up before we start stream because it looks like I'm just a screen
age or like no totally that's okay cool good good good
this is a huge enclosure yes this is our gray wolf habitat
we currently have one gray wolf in our care who's taking
it looks like a big-time warning map right on his shelter there
All right, this is Dearest.
He is a gray wolf by species, but obviously he's not totally gray.
He's all white and he's actually got a really cute pink nose and his eyes are really pretty
golden yellow color.
And gray wolves, they live all over the state of Alaska.
It's actually the only place they've never been put on the endangered species list or
the only state I should say where they've never been endangered.
He's currently our only resident gray wolf.
His enclosure is really large,
because oftentimes wolves live in packs.
We have had other wolves in our care at times.
He's currently a lone wolf in here,
and he's a really mature gray wolf.
He's around 10 years old, I wanna say.
And usually their wildlife span is only about
four, five to about seven years old.
So in human care, they can usually greatly expand
their lifespan.
enclosure. Yeah, he loves them.
He's really good with them too.
So back there, the shifts.
That's just like a fancy name for a secondary part of his enclosure.
And we use them to shift the animals in there and we can use it for like training,
cleaning, to feed them for veterinary care, pretty much anything you can think of.
And he often gets his diet in there and he shifts really, really well.
We're building a three acre Mexican gray wolf enclosure.
Oh, that's so awesome.
The train is kind of listening.
Oh yeah, we'll hang out for a second.
He does howl when the train goes by.
It'll probably wake him up.
The horn's really loud,
and he likes to sing along with it.
How many wolves do you guys have here, total or is this it?
Just him right now, we have had up to five in his pack.
And like I said, he's a pretty mature gray wolf,
in the other four in his pack within the last year and a half
from just past from old age.
So he is learning how to hang out in here by himself,
which is something that wild wolves have to do too.
They have members of their pack that disperse or pass on
and they have to learn how to adjust their social life
to it because wolves are really, really social animals
and they're incredibly intelligent
when it comes to their social interactions.
Folks often ask us if he's like an alpha wolf
or if we've had an alpha wolf in the past,
But it's kind of a big myth with wolves is that alpha wolf trope.
So it's usually actually an alpha pair, a mom and a dad for that pack.
And they're the parents, they make sure everybody stays in line.
They make sure everyone gets food.
They're the ones that are going to have puppies every year.
And he kind of has a dominant personality when things around other wolves.
But it's not always that he's right on top.
He can kind of mesh in between socials, kind of a social chameleon.
Got it.
Cool.
I'm him and Kobuk are actually pretty good buddies. They'll exhibit play
behaviors along the fence line. Really? Really get going. Kobuk has some
really special enrichment that Dearest wants to get in on. He'll try and play
along the fence line with him. I think it's kind of an adorable little animal
friendship. Yeah, that's sick. Can he FaceTime the wolf dog? So he has friends.
We have two wolf dogs that I'll visit. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I don't know, guys.
I don't know. Maybe we'll work on setting that up.
That would be really cute.
We're working on one of our folks has a huge Alaskan Malamute
and they've met through the fence a couple times.
We're working on building a dog run, hopefully,
where they can meet and hang out with each other during the day.
So there's a pair on the lens. I don't see anything.
Yeah, we can scoot on over to our reindeer and we'll make our way back this way anyway
so if the train comes by we'll just hop right over here and listen to Dearest in his songs.
Flashbang, don't panic.
Oh, you got it.
Okay, you got...
He's a genius.
He got it.
new wisdom this morning I think. I'm pretty sure I didn't see that when I
rolled in this morning. Yeah. If you guys didn't know this, it's gonna really freak you out.
This is awesome. Yeah. So these are our resident reindeer here. We've got a four
in this habitat currently and we've got a lot to talk about with these guys.
Yeah. So we've got all stages of antlers going on right in front of us
here. This one closest to us, she is, or actually I'll start with this guy, make it
easier. This is one of our new residents here. You can see he's got really
gorgeous antlers going on. A lot of folks get to learn about antlers when they
come here. There's a lot of mystery that comes with them. So antlers, they're made
of bone. They actually grow these every single year. They shed them off and
grow a brand new pair every single year. So every year they're gonna grow
ones that look slightly different. Usually as they get older, they get a little bit larger.
And this is usually how people see them when they just look like, you know, very majestic.
The bone is sticking out of their head. But they actually start off looking like this.
We see our other reindeer over here. They are covered in this fuzzy, like really short fur. We
call it velvet. And that's when they just start to grow. They're covered in velvet.
And then in the fall time, they're going to shed that velvet off,
which is what was happening with that other reindeer. You saw all of that fur and that skin hanging off and there was some blood on her antlers.
It doesn't hurt them. It's more like an uncomfortable, really itchy sensation. Imagine like
we get a sunburn and you're peeling. It's just a little bit uncomfortable.
You'll see them scratching on trees and on their shelter to get that velvet off.
And then in the fall time and through the winter their antlers are gonna grow like this and eventually at the end of the winter
winter nearing into spring,
they're going to shed the entire antlers off their head.
You'll see them shaking their head around a lot
and they'll just pop right off their head.
Sometimes one at a time,
you can get an Alaskan unicorn
where they walk around with one antler for a week or two.
And then they're going to drop those
and start the whole thing over again as summer starts
and they'll grow a whole new set of antlers
every single year.
So you have males and females in here
are the males neutered or you have-
Some of them are and some of them aren't. This guy who's a new addition, he's not, but some of our older ones are.
Yeah, the clicking noise, that's the clicking on the rooftop from that Christmas song. That's where it comes from.
I don't know exactly what causes it, but they've got really special adaptive hooves that help them
walk around in the Arctic on ice and that's what makes that clicking noise.
Um, they all have it so it's not like they've got bad joints or anything.
That's naturally reindeer and curbou have that click-clack.
Yeah, we're on the other side. They all walk through the feed and they all walk through the feed.
Yeah.
And these guys, both the males and the females get to grow antlers.
Um, if you've ever seen male deer or male moose or male elk,
only those guys get to grow antlers and the females won't.
But reindeer and caribou, both of them,
everybody gets to grow antlers,
which I think is super special.
And these guys have a couple other superpowers.
They're super well adapted to the living in the Arctic.
They actually change their eye color throughout the year
in order to adapt to the changing weather up here in Alaska.
So in the Arctic winter,
they're basically getting no hours of sunlight
in their natural ranges.
So they have to become really sensitive
to whatever light is bouncing off the moon,
and off the snow or off of bodies of water
or ice they might be around.
So that outer layer of their eyeball
that's really dark right now actually turns
to like an icy white blue color.
And they've got, I guess, night vision
for about six months out of the year.
And then in the Arctic summer,
when they're getting no rest from the sun,
it's like almost 24 hours.
They put their sunglasses on
and their eyes turned back to that dark brown
or like a golden color, which I think is super awesome.
cool these guys it's hard for me to identify him out here right now thank you um that one way back
there who's shedding her name is fern and then these guys right up here we've got shakespear
caesar and then currently boris he's gonna be getting a new name
and we have two other reindeer in our carry that are in a separate yard we've got a
Neville and Holly.
Thank you.
And where, you don't have to say where all of them came from,
but are these injuries, were they bred and captivity,
or have they got here?
Yeah, so these guys are a little bit of an exception
to the rule.
Boris, he actually came from another part of Alaska.
There's a reindeer farm up in Palmer,
where they have tons of reindeer.
A reindeer are often used for farming up here in Alaska.
and we brought him into our care recently.
The couple of these other guys,
I don't totally remember their origin stories.
They're all somewhere between six years old
and they're kind of like early to mid teens,
which is pretty old for reindeer.
But these guys kind of come from a whole bunch
of different places versus some of our other animals
have really individualized stories, if that makes sense.
Are they farmed for meat?
In Alaska, yeah, it's pretty common
to see like reindeer me around. Of course the ones in our care we don't do that but in Alaska yeah.
Thank you for the hundred dollars thank you so much. Man they're beautiful. Yeah this guy's got
some really gorgeous antlers growing on him and typically you'll see a little bit of a difference
between the girls and the boys they're antlers. You can see his have a bunch of different
They're a little bit bigger in hers or a lot slimmer.
They've only got one or two times.
It's not always a rule of thumb.
Holly, one of our other females,
she grows antlers just like the boys.
Really big and have a whole bunch of tines, but-
Tines is where it splits off.
Yeah, so like she's got maybe like one or two.
And the time that sticks out over their face,
it's called the shovel.
They usually only have it on one side of their antlers
and they literally use it like a shovel.
They use it to dig out snow and in order to get to all of the lichen that's underneath
in the Arctic, that's called cratering is when they move that snow and they leave craters
behind and sometimes reindeer or caribou they'll have two shovels and they're double shovels.
Well, do moose do that as well? They can they will lose their antlers earlier than these guys
typically caribou will keep them through the winter at least female caribou will
moose typically lose them a little bit earlier and their main winter food source is going to be stripping bark off of
existing trees because they live a little bit further down in Alaska, so they are you know closer to those boreal forests and down here in South Central Alaska.
Yeah, and so they get they always make that little clicking noise, you know, the
Christmas Carol that's like click on the on the rooftop. It is true they make the clicking sound it sounds like they've got some bad joints like if a human was walking around and you've heard the clicking you'd be a little concerned but it's natural for them.
I remember exactly what causes it but they have really specialized clothes for living in Alaska and living in the Arctic. Their hooves are really really wide for helping their legs are and they've got these four clothes in their hooves that allow them to
just play out like snow shoes so they can walk really easily across ice when their habitat
is all winterized and they've got ice sheets everywhere.
It doesn't bother them at all.
They're running along just like if it was summertime up here.
We just showed them the sign.
Can you tell them a little bit about rut?
Yeah.
So rut is a fancy word for a breeding season for animals and typically for hoof stock
like these guys.
happens sometime generally in the fall and rut is mostly referring to male
animals they have a lot of behavioral changes that going on they can sometimes
get more aggressive so we have signs around because in the fall time when
they're getting ready to breed or they're getting ready to mate oftentimes
those males like I said they're gonna get more aggressive they might be more likely to get ready to hang out with the ladies for a little bit
So they go through some behavioral changes and then once that sees it
naturally evolutionary is up they go back to having their regular
personalities that we see. So we often tell folks they've been in the fall giving
just a couple extra inches of room. Cool. Cool. Alright sweet.
Alright we can swing back this way. We'll make another pass by Mr. Dearest and Mr. Cobuck.
Yeah, that was the one that was shutting was up here at the V&A.
Yeah, that literally probably happened in the last three hours or so.
I rolled into work at about eight and I saw her on my way in and she did not have any
shed going on.
So, she must have been doing some good work.
There you go.
That's pretty special, let's stream her a little bit.
So where are we headed now?
We're gonna head behind our gift shop here.
Meet some of our smaller critters.
We're gonna get close to some of our
North American porcupines and then we're gonna go feed
Mr. Heath some of his afternoon diet.
Sweet.
Chad, have you ever seen a North American porcupine?
I feel like, well actually I don't know
what you guys think of when you think of a porcupine,
but I always think of the African crested ones first.
Those are those like, they're big, they're like, this big, um, and they've got the banded
quills.
North American porcupines are like, if you took a, like a teddy bear and made it really
point out.
Yeah, that's usually what I say and sometimes you can't see their quills because they
have so much fur so they look extra fluffy and cute.
So we move your mic onto your lane here.
Yeah.
And I'll move with the lanes.
Do you think I can go in for this?
Yeah.
That's nice.
They kind of look softer.
They look softer.
Yeah.
They can be pretty misleading.
They've got a lot of myths about them.
Yeah.
And they make really cute noises.
And while we're walking back there,
I can talk a little bit more just about AWCC
generally. So our central mission, we are a sanctuary dedicated to preserving Alaska's wildlife
through conservation, education, research, and quality animal care. So those are kind of our
four pillars of what we do here. Quality animal care almost always is the thing that comes first.
And then education, we see thousands of people come through here that get to learn
from these animals that are getting a second chance of life. And almost all of our animals,
they were once wild. There's one reason or another that can't survive on their own.
The majority of them are orphaned and animals can get orphaned for a bunch of different reasons.
A lot of times it can be natural, something that happens pretty often with wildlife,
but of course some animals get orphaned by, you know, human needs. People accidentally can
orphan animals. Sometimes people are doing things that separate animals from the rest of
of their herd and we have a couple animals in our care
that were injured, that were eligible to stay in human care
and all of them were designated here
to be their permanent home by the state of Alaska.
So it's not our staff that's going out there
and picking up a bear off the side of the road.
There's a whole bunch of processes
that they get to go through
in order to have a permanent home here
and that's where the quality animal care comes in.
A lot of these animals are really long-lived
can stay with us for the entirety of their life.
And so we get to see them grow up and change.
Our next stop here is gonna be Hurtu Canada Lynx.
And I'll say our best bet to see them
is to hop up on this ramp over here.
Gets a little bit of the glare away.
And sometimes we have to do a little bit of eye spy
to see our Lynx in here.
We've got one male and one female in here.
female. Her name is Chena. She was illegally trapped near North Pole,
Alaska, which is a real place, and she was actually kept in a chicken coop for
many years, which as you can imagine her large cat is not a really great home. So
she's a little bit on the older side. She has some missing toes from some
frostbite injuries. She's missing those ear tufts on her ears, but she's got a
a lot of space to roam here.
She's gotten to stretch out
and get to figure out her personality.
She's very sassy
and she's a really wonderful individual in our care.
Calvin, he is our male that lives in here.
He was orphaned as a kitten near Bethel, Alaska,
which is all the way on the left side of the state here.
And he's lived with us pretty much his entire life.
He came in as a really, I would say big kitten,
but the baby pictures of him are pretty awesome.
And they like to just like regular house cats
sneak into little corners and tuck into little places
where we sometimes have a hard time finding them.
Oh yeah, we can swing around for sure.
Calvin and Gina.
Yeah.
And Calvin, that was not always his name.
He was formerly known as Calliope,
because we thought that he was a female.
And you might be thinking, how did you not know
that he was a boy?
But a lot of times it's actually more difficult
than you think when it comes to wildlife.
Things are not quite as obvious as they may come across.
And once you do some veterinary care,
you realize, oh, maybe we were wrong.
But yeah, that is Calvin up there taking a snooze.
You can see his ear tufts on top of his ears there.
Those kind of help direct the wind and direct sound
into their ears.
They've got very, very sensitive hearing.
And that white patch on his fur, those are his paws.
He, like the reindeer, have really huge paws
that also work like snow shoes.
And there's his face.
Yeah, that is super cool.
They're like definitely one of the more elusive animals.
Oftentimes people just seem like dashing
off in the distance.
I've never gotten to see a wild one,
but you can hear them sometimes.
They make a really awesome noise
that kind of sounds like a mix between a meow
and a car alarm is what I usually say,
where we're like, is somebody's alarm going off?
Or is it Calvin talking to a raven
that's outside his habitat?
And these guys in the wild,
they pretty much only eat snowshoe hairs.
So they've got those big paws
in the really incredible hearing
so that they can hear those rabbits
those hairs moving around in the snow and when they walk around they're almost completely silent.
So unless they're making vocal sounds we almost can never hear them they're really
going to be super, super sneaky.
Joshina, Connor's on my tip. Connor was saying that we saw one. That's what she was saying.
That's pretty, pretty rare to see. We're pretty lucky.
My favorite song in the world.
Yeah.
We'll keep on cruising.
Connor has gotten really good at shooting through wire.
That's true.
I'm definitely putting this place on my list to visit when I go to Alaska next year.
Yay!
Yeah, this one's open to the public.
You guys can check it out.
we do a whole bunch of tours you can just come in and self-guided or we do
encounters where you can meet our animals and sometimes feed them or like
build enrichment for co-buck is one that we do a lot. This is our currently our
oldest resident at AWCC. This is Snappy. He's a great horned owl and he's got
his eyes open right now which you don't always get to see. He's a
nocturnal animal so when his eyes are open during the day it's kind of a
special treat. He came to us in 1999 and he already had adult plumage at that time, so
we're estimating he was probably born around 96, 97, but we really don't know
exactly for sure. Great horned owls are really long-lived critters, so they can
live up into their 30s, 40s, I'm sure even longer in human care.
Chattie's pushing 30. Why snappy? So as you can imagine, he was an adult wild animal
when he came into our care and he originally came to us because he was the victim of an
unethical use of firearms. So it's not legal to hunt or shoot great horned owls in Alaska,
but he is a partial wing amputee. So he's got about one and a half wings. You can't really tell
unless he spreads them. So when he came into human care, you can imagine he was probably
pretty confused. He was probably pretty scared and he probably snapped a couple times. And
The guy really sharp beaks.
He probably tried to bite the folks
that were actively rehabilitating him
or getting him into human care.
So that's where he got his name.
But he typically is a pretty mellow, chill guy,
as you can see.
And he's starting to close those eyes there.
You can see on the sign here,
that's what they look like when they're fully open.
He's got enormous eyeballs.
They take up a really significant portion
of his skull space.
they're actually so large that he can't turn his eyes
from side to side.
So if he wants to look at you,
he has to turn his head and look directly at you.
He can't give you side eye or anything.
He has to look directly at you.
And that's why owls can turn their head so far around
about three quarters of the way around,
not all the way around.
And if we were gonna have the same eyeball
to skull ratio is snappy for the size
of a human skull, our eyeballs would have
to be grapefruit size.
So just to give you an idea of how much of his noggin is eyeball,
it's pretty much all of it.
That's so crazy.
Is it all the predator or the coyote?
Yeah, coyote kits.
So really, really little ones when they're just little babies.
Yeah, not full grown ones.
I don't know about it like that.
You're walking.
Hi.
I'm not sure exactly what our plan is currently. This is a temporary housing spot for one of
our other North American porcupines. His name is Baby Ruth because his habitat is currently
in this construction zone and obviously that's not ideal for a little porcupine. So he's
actually very happy temporarily living in there. I'm not sure if we're planning on
remodeling that space back for another bird or not.
This is fun. This is our third North American porcupine. His name is Twix.
They all have candy bar names if you haven't caught on by now.
It looks like he might be snoozing. We'll get some porcupine time in a
minute.
Oh, another one that's not always out here.
Yeah, I'll keep my voice down here.
This is Marvin.
He is an American Martin.
He's in the mustelid family or weasel family,
so he's related to like domestic ferrets
and wolverines and otters.
And he's a really curious guy.
He's got those really big ears.
He's around four pounds,
so he's kind of like a ginormous ferret
if anyone's ever seen those guys.
And kind of like how I talked about earlier,
Cobuck having that white blaze on his chest.
He also has one, it's called a bib,
these guys that bright orange spot on his chest and it's also individual so his markings are not
going to look like the next American Martin. And you can see he's got a lot of trees in here too.
They oftentimes live in like boreal forests and the forest of parts of Alaska are really common
and they look really tiny and cute but they are predators. They're carnivores. They
almost exclusively are eating mice and rats and redback bowls and meadow bowls
here in Alaska. They can even eat small birds and their scavengers so they can
eat larger things as well. You can see he's got some old enrichment here that
he just walked over. We put some carrots and it looks like maybe some
celery sticks inside of something for him to dig up and get them out of there.
Are Martins farmed for fur throughout the U.S.?
I don't know if they're farmed for fur.
Up in Alaska they are a species that is trapped for fur quite often and the trapping laws
vary based on who you are and where you're living.
Oh my goodness, he's kind of showing off.
I lowered my voice because he tends to be a little bit on the shire side and is
not always visible.
you'll see he really likes to hang out in boxes.
So he's got a couple of boxes up in that corner
that's usually where I see him.
But he's showing off.
Somebody's got something that smells really yummy for him,
I'm sure.
He's an American Martin.
They are related to measles,
he had chat, muscle in, measles, potters.
Man, that is a cute man.
I know, sometimes we have to remember that he is a carnivore, he's a predator, but he's
really adorable.
He comes in a really adorable, cute little package.
And he, again, I like a lot of our animals, they've got really big paws for the size of
their body.
That's so he can climb really well, he can climb upwards and downwards, and so he can
walk across the snow and dig, these are all things that kind of help them survive
in the Alaskan landscape.
Is this one that's exploded in the pet trade at all?
I would imagine.
I don't actually know too much about it,
but if I were to make an educated guess,
I would say yes.
He would be a pretty bad pet.
He's very vocal.
As sweet and charming as he's being right now,
he's got a lot to say,
and he's definitely got a set of lungs on him.
And a lot of animals in the mustalid family,
domestic varites are like this as well.
They have to be fed pretty constantly.
They've got to have access to food almost all of the time
because they have a really, really, really high metabolism.
So oftentimes for pets, they are not advantageous.
But-
He's so fast and agile.
Yeah.
So I just would get everything.
He's kind of like a flash of light
when he's moving through there.
If he gets the zoomies,
there's definitely a difference between him
and his domesticated counterparts for sure.
I'm glad he was out. Sometimes I don't even stop by him because we don't always see him.
Very sweet.
Cool. You said Marvin?
Yeah, Marvin the Martin.
Marvin the Martin, love it.
Cute.
Alright, and it looks like our coyotes are being shy over here.
Fair.
We'll make our next stop.
We're going to go in with Heath and give him a little bit of snackies.
Maybe on our way out, our coyotes will want to come hang.
So that was a cute, I've never seen a Martin in person.
Yeah, they're pretty elusive just because they're small and they're quick and they
know how to hide really well.
But they're pretty abundant throughout Alaska.
All right, we'll make sure we get everybody over here.
I mean, it's like.
Yeah, we're going to open the secret door.
So we're going to enter the habitat with Heath.
Like I said, he's a North American porcupine.
He only has three legs.
He was found frozen to a trail or frozen to the ground.
He already had three legs at that time, I believe.
We don't know exactly what happened to him.
Probably a predator tried to get him or they can be susceptible to frostbite because
They don't got fur on the bottom of their feet,
so they could have frozen to the ground.
Luckily, he was in a place where people found him,
called the Department of Fish and Gain here in Alaska.
They scooped him up.
We healed that arm injury.
It's his front right leg,
and he's lived with us ever since,
but not to fear.
He has pretty much all of his mobility,
so he's a phenomenal climber.
He still moves pretty quickly,
which for a porcupine,
their max speed is two miles an hour.
So he still hits that two miles an hour really well.
And he loves snacks and he loves people.
So when we go in there, I'll head in there first,
I'll get him to his station
or see what he wants to do today.
And then I'll let you guys know when he's ready for ya.
I've got some tongs for us.
We've got some snacks.
We've got some of his favorites today.
Thank you so much, Becky.
We've got some sweet potato and some apple,
which are typically his favorite foods.
They're pretty strict herbivores.
he's got a really nice healthy diet and then when we go in there we can just feed him and hang out
with him and I'll tell you a little bit more about pork clients. Only rules while we're in there,
of course he's got quills. He can't actually shoot them out of his body. It's a big misconception
with these guys. So as long as we don't touch him we're gonna be just fine. We'll hang out with
him and we'll just keep like calm bodies and calm voices in there. We don't have to whisper
by any means but if we start running around he might get a little antsy and we don't want
to stress them out in his house. Other than that I'll let you know what we're
doing when we're in there. Yeah if you guys want to come in on the inside of
this wooden and we can just kind of like sneak around the edge here. And then if
If we want to put one of those wooden things back up, yeah.
What if he touches you?
Ouchie a little bit, maybe.
He moves slow enough that you can usually avoid it.
They've got barbed quills?
Yeah, they do.
Whereas the African porcupine has really long,
those the barred ones, where it's like,
it's like, what is it?
These guys have barbeds.
So if it gets stuck in there, it's kind of like, you know.
And then when you guys come in, if you can just
wash that one.
Heath.
Oh, they're so cute.
Good morning Heath.
Here's, say we have snacks.
Heath, let's go.
You want to go down this way?
He's glorious, strats.
Oh yeah, right.
Here he comes.
She's trying to get him up to this platform, guys.
Alright, and as soon as he comes up here, you guys can come on in.
Let's go over here, bud.
Wow, snacks.
So yeah, you can see he's got no problem climbing, even though he's only got three
legs.
And this is the man of the hour.
He is the most adorable, most prickly guy in our care here.
And you're more than welcome to feed him a chunk.
And then whenever he's done, you can just put it right up to his nose.
For you.
Oh, yeah.
They don't have very good eyesight, but they have a really good sense of smell and then
all of these types of fur to kind of help them navigate their environment.
You'll see he's got whiskers, like cat or a dog.
He's got these really long hairs coming off of him.
These are called guard hairs.
These are not the quills.
Those are kind of like an extension of his whiskers.
So when he goes into his hutch,
he can use those to feel around where he is.
Then he has his down fur,
that fuzzy stuff on his face and his paws.
And then the quills are actually a modified type of hair.
So.
I was gonna ask, yeah.
Oh my gosh.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, he'll be okay.
It's a lot more endearing when he makes the chewing noises than like when your friend is doing it at the dinner table.
He's going to town on the sweet potato there.
Yeah, I'll get you spring loaded and when he's done, you can just put it right up to
his nose and he'll very gently take it from you.
yeah this is his favorite I know isn't he adorable yeah he's all good and you
can kind of start to see his quills when he's got his head down here those
little white speckles nice isn't that like the coolest thing you've ever
done. Those quills, kind of like the African porcupines you were talking about, they still
have like the banding colors, they're white at the bottom and then they're black on the tip,
and that's where the microscopic barbs are, and they're actually hollow on the inside
and they're kind of toothpick size, they range in size around his body and he's got an estimated
for 30,000 quills on his body. So everywhere except for his face and his tummy and his paws.
You'll see he's got those nice long nails. Those help him climb. We've actually specially
designed the porcupine habitats with different fencing so that they can climb it. You'll notice
that it's got these cube or squares instead of the chain link and that's so that they can climb
around their habitat because normally they live in trees. So we allow them to climb these guys and
we can see them and monitor them better than if we had big old trees in here. Can I give another
one with uh business heck of them? Or is this an apple? Um I think yeah it's some sort of potato
He's ready for you.
Shots, Mac.
Nice.
That was such a good shot.
He's really good for like a .5 picture.
His snout is incredibly cute.
And if anyone noticed, he has really orange teeth.
That's not because we don't take care of him.
They naturally have orange teeth.
So these guys are rodents.
They're really closely related to beavers.
And a lot of rodents have those orange teeth.
They have different chemicals that have kind of like a protective dental coating, because
when they're chewing on bark and on branches, they want a little bit of extra protection.
If humans were to chew on bark and branches all the time, our teeth might be a little
messed up.
Wow, the close-up.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
I just brought a bunch because it's so fun to feed a porcupine.
I'm ready. He's ready.
Oh no.
That was awesome.
He's a superstar.
He steals the show
and well within his reason.
And what'll go after him in the wild?
It seems like it'd be a terrible time.
Yeah, they actually don't.
A lot of animals can eat porcupines,
but a lot of them won't.
because they've got 30,000 quills on their body.
The best predators or hunters, I should say,
of porcupines are actually wolverines,
and sometimes wolves, wolverines can climb trees
and they can flip the porcupines over.
And on their tummy, where they're not protected,
that's where they can get them.
A lot of other animals, there's actually one bear
that we're gonna meet later who's in our care,
who had bitten a porcupine as a baby
and was covered in porcupine quills.
and if you're an animal and you don't have thumbs
to take those pills out,
there's not really a lot you can do.
It can be pretty dangerous for them to continue on.
So a lot of animals choose not to go after porcupines.
It's a really great way for them to be protected.
He's so cute.
How old was she now?
She is 26.
Whoa.
Oh, well, we'll get to see her today, hopefully.
She will come get, she's a sweetie pie.
She's tough by the end of the whole time for me.
Yeah, she, I like to call her Princess Bear.
She's a really good one.
Chad, we're going to get a couple more pieces here.
I'll do ASMR segment.
I'm going to hand him this last one and while he's eating that we'll make our way out here.
Thank you so much.
Of course.
That's the best part of my job.
Feeding critters.
Awesome.
Oh my god, it's so cute.
It's awesome.
We saw actually chat we've seen one for define on the wild on stream right at the San Antonio
He's laying down after his snacks, he's going to take a nap.
He goes from like a perfect round ball to flat pancake.
That's incredible.
What a legend.
Wow.
Wow, that's amazing.
Of course, we'll go over our little land bridge here.
Nice.
We live in a temperate rainforest up here and get a lot of rain,
so we get a lot of puddles, so we build some puddle bridges for folks.
W. Heath, yeah, he's cute, huh, Chats?
Special guy.
And we have a very well camouflaged snoozing critter right here, right on top of the rocks.
This is an Arctic fox.
Oh my gosh.
We have two Arctic foxes in our care.
also a red fox that lives in this habitat with them. Our arctic fox's names are Burt and Ernie.
This is Burt right in front of us here. And then our red fox, his name is Warren.
These arctic foxes, they came into our care from another facility. They were transferred into our
care by the state of Alaska. And Warren, the red fox, he's a really great example
of animals that were accidentally orphaned by people. So he is from another part of South
Central Alaska when he was just a little fox kit his mom had stashed him somewhere while she went off to get food or take
A nap or do whatever she needed to do because she didn't have a babysitter and
Someone a very well-intentioned person found him thought that he was orphan picked him up and brought him to the state of Alaska
And likely mom would have come back for him
But once he was taken out of that natural environment he wasn't able to go back in so he was eligible to remain in human care
He's about two, maybe three years old now, but yeah, that's a great example of folks
that are really well-intentioned trying to help animals.
The best thing you can do if you ever find an orphaned or injured animal is to call whatever
state you're in, the Department of Fish and Game, the Department of Wildlife, and
they will come out and assess whether or not that animal needs help or is actually
orphaned.
But Warren's been able to live a really happy and healthy life with us and have
two really fantastic roommates.
One of them is Burt right here.
Arctic foxes are super cool.
They've got some of the warmest fur
in the whole animal kingdom.
They have this brown or gray fur in the summertime.
And then in the winter,
when people typically see them or see pictures of them,
they've got really white fluffy coats.
And that fur can keep them warm up to,
you know, negative 40, 50, 60, 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
They don't usually start to get cold
until that negative 40,
negative 50 degrees Fahrenheit range.
So they are really small, but mighty.
This is their full grown size.
I believe they're less than 10 pounds.
Folks often ask us if they're babies,
but they're just little.
They are really feisty in little packages here.
We often joke that Bert and Ernie share
one brain cell between them
and they can never have it at the same time.
They often get the zoomies when we all go in there.
Oh, cute.
And these guys, they are technically omnivores,
but mostly on the carnivore side.
So they will eat berries if they have to,
but most of the time they're gonna be eating meat.
So in the wintertime in the wild,
they actually go out onto sea ice and ocean.
They will eat scraps left behind by polar bears
and other animals that live up there.
And then in the summertime, their favorite food is eggs.
There's a lot of migratory birds that come up to Alaska
to breed and lay eggs.
And these guys are egg stealers,
so they can eat up to a thousand eggs
in a summer season, stealing them from shorebirds.
and we try and give them as many eggs as we can in human care.
That was an egg, but it's wild.
What's he doing?
Cool.
That's some snooze in foxes.
This is the enclosure where I got the idea for the fox baffling.
Oh, there you go.
Connor just said this enclosure is where
he got the idea for the fox baffling.
So our American Red Fox enclosure at Alves,
because you might notice the fence looks kind of similar
and that we have this baffling at the top.
We visit a lot of really great facilities
and bring back a lot of really great information.
So thank you.
That's what we do too.
We learn from other folks that take care of unique
and large animals.
All right.
And we'll scoot over this way.
We're going to start sizing up again
and meeting some of our larger animals in our care.
And depending on where they are, we'll take different routes.
I'm seeing one loose over there.
We could have another one up front here.
Let's do a little survey of their habitat here.
So Chad, I'll just, I'll recap a little bit
if you're just, if you're just now rolling in.
We're at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center.
This is the organization that we were fundraising for,
for those three, four days,
me and Adopt on our Alaska streams.
We did a flyover in the helicopters of this facility, so if you guys remember my first
plus one of the whole trip was when we flew over because this is where Conor and Kayla
used to be interns.
It's also where Conor and Kayla met.
Conor is behind the camera director of operations at LVS, Kayla is our director of animal welfare.
And we saw all these red buildings like in the green vastness from the helicopter.
So this is that facility.
And they do really great conservation work and education work and rehabilitation work where
with Christina she's giving us a whole tour.
It's pretty awesome.
Yeah, very excited to show off the critters in our care.
They are all the stars of the show and I'm very excited to work with them and get to
call them my coworkers and my buds.
All right.
So we're walking up on our three resident moose here.
Might have to get a couple different angles
to see all three of them.
We can either hang out here or two of our other moose
are right over there.
We can walk that way a little bit.
Yeah, I might get some more space here.
W. Mies, they said.
Hi.
I wasn't, I was going to go back the same day with Gilbert and Adapt, but I ended up staying a couple extra days.
We have a lot to talk about when I get back.
But I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to see it. I'm excited to show you guys where your fundraising dollars are going. It's pretty cool.
Oh, yeah, here we'll get an awesome shot of one of our females in our male moose.
So for anybody that was here earlier and saw our reindeer up close,
the moose have also, they also have antlers.
They have a similar thing going on with the velvet and where they shed their velvet.
So you'll see Elend. That's our male moose on the left there.
You'll see he's got antlers and the female on the right, I believe that's Pip.
She does not grow antlers and his antlers still have the velvet on there.
It might take him a little bit longer to shed that fur off before
just the bone of the antler sticking out of his noggin.
But just like the reindeer and the caribou, he's going to grow a
brand new set of those antlers every single year.
it's the fastest growing tissue in his whole body. And we've got three resident moose in total. We
walked past one of our females over there. Her name is Joe. She's named after Josephine Marsh from
the book Little Women. And Pip over here is named after Pippi Longstocking, which I think is
pretty cute. And Elin is the Dutch word for moose, I believe. And so that's where they all
got their names. Our two female moose, they're the same age. They're both six years old.
they were both orphaned in the first year of their life. They were just a couple months old.
Joe, she's from the Anchorage area and Pip I believe is from down on the Kenai Peninsula near
Seward and so they were actually bottle raised by our staff here and bottle raising is all
fun and games until you remember that it has to happen around the clock. So we'll have staff
coming in at midnight at 4 a.m., at 8 a.m. and then every four hours bottle feeding
those little calves, and that can happen for all species. And they can get a variety of different
things. A lot of times we'll do goat's milk as a substitute for these guys, which is pretty difficult
to find up here in Alaska. So oftentimes just fundraisers can help us help babies like these guys.
And you'll see they've got this nice big pond behind them. Moose love to swim. And they're
really good swimmers. They're laying down right now, but they've got really long, gangly
legs that help them swim and they actually eat a lot of like aquatic grasses and
pelps and things like that they've got a really wide variety in their diet they
love willow they love alder they love cottonwood pretty much anything that's
got leaves they're gonna munch on it how many yeah that's so awesome that's a
question. Full time year round staff, I want to say maybe around anywhere between 35 and 50 at maximum.
And then we have a whole bunch more in the summer. We have seasonal staff that come in for every
department. And then some of our departments will have interns like internship programs
that Connor was a part of. And so then we'll bump up with another 20 plus seasonal staff.
Yeah.
So all those interns aren't fit
in the bunk house anymore, are they?
Well, actually this year, all of our interns
were in the bunk house.
We've now got some additional housing in Girdwood,
but if you were an intern at AWCC,
you get to live above the moose habitat
and the building we lovingly call the bunk house,
where you get to have some pretty wild roommates.
The musk ox live on one side
and the moose live on the other side
and then all the interns
have a big old grand time upstairs.
So.
It is a lot of fun.
Yeah, it's a really cool building.
Plus, you look outside and there's a moose,
the joke never gets old.
You can say it every single morning.
You get some pretty spectacular views of Portage, Alaska.
So not bad.
Keep on cruising.
Our next stop is also one of my favorite stops
I try and not say it about every critter,
but the next stop is pretty good.
Next week.
WP on today.
Keep an eye on the line.
How long have you been here?
I've been here actually for just under a year.
I've been in Alaska for several years and originally from the state of Michigan.
Okay.
and I moved up to Alaska to be a wild bear guide down in southeast Alaska so folks come
into Alaska, everyone wants to see a bear. So I would take people out on hikes to go see bears
and then I found this place and fell in love and now I get to have my dream job which is pretty
cool to say. That's awesome. How many visitors do they get assuming they're open to the public?
like that, you know, like annually?
I can have some like rough numbers.
I don't know exactly for visitation,
but on my end, as the education supervisor,
I know how many people like we're talking to
and it's in the tens of thousands every single year.
And we usually track numbers closest,
like in the summertime.
So how many people did we actually get to have
face-to-face conversation with?
And that's in the tens of thousands of people.
And I'm sure there's tens of thousands of people more
that we didn't even get to talk to you,
but got to come and learn about these animals
and contribute to their quality of life.
That's awesome.
And kids get in here free, right?
Yeah, kids under the age of three are free.
There is an Alaska resident discount as well.
And a lot of our tours and our encounters,
the admission is included.
So if you are booking an encounter,
lecture right in and you can come experience some cool stuff with some critters here.
Oh this is so cool. This is my in my top five cutest baby animals of all time.
Definitely we're gonna try and see one later if they make really adorable babies
and personally I think they make really cute adults but I don't know if
everyone's on that board with me. These guys are our muskox.
Muskox are native to Alaska and I usually like to say they kind of look
like a conglomerate of a bunch of different types of animals kind of like
a wildebeest situation here but these guys they usually live a little bit
further north than we are right now and quite a few on the west side of the
state here and we've got some of our big males right in front of us eating
some of their morning grain. Those black bulls have their grain in them
And these guys are really closely related to goats and sheep, so you think big horn
sheep when you look at their horns, because they use them to headbutt each other and to
ram each other to prove who's the biggest, baddest musk ox.
And I've talked a whole bunch about antlers.
These guys have horns, not antlers, so they don't grow them every single year.
They get one set of them for life.
And if they break them or if they crack them, it's just kind of tough luck.
That's how they've got to deal with it.
You'll see this male right in front of us here.
This is one of our older males.
His name is Chugach, and he's only got one horn left.
So he has been using it a long time
to headbutt other muskox in this habitat,
or if you look in their shelter,
we'll see a couple of plywood patches going on there
and a couple of holes in the wall.
Those are also from our muskox,
getting a little bit of attitude with their shelter there.
And then-
What a weird kind of thing.
They look kind of like a kid trying to draw a cow, but it's like inspired by aliens and they end up with this guy
So cute. Are they ruminants?
Actually, I'm not sure. The moose are for sure
And if we walk around on this side, I know we can get a really good shot of this guy that who's got his head down in the bowl
I guess if they're related to goats probably, huh?
Their heads are so big.
I know.
What is going on with that?
It's so funny.
So this is a really good spot to talk about their horns too.
So this is a female on the left.
She also has horns.
You'll see they're a lot smaller than this guy right in front of us.
The portion of their horns that's on their forehead, we call them the boss, because whoever's
got the biggest one is the boss.
It's about four inches thick, their horns, on that portion of their head.
And underneath there, their skull is another three inches thick.
So they've got big heads, most of it is skull.
And that's like a built-in helmet for when they're headbutting each other for dominance.
They've also got really cute ears.
If you look at the female they've got,
like perfectly triangle ears,
they're kind of like fuzzy Doritos shape.
It's really adorable.
I would expect them to airplane more out to the side.
I wish they did.
They're really adorable.
And these guys also have really special fur.
So obviously in Alaska,
every animal that lives here has really warm fur.
These guys kind of give the Arctic foxes
run for their money. There's a special name for a Mustach's fur. It's called
Kibbut. And that's an Alaska native word and the English translation a lot of
folks will say is that it's the warmest wool. And usually we say it's about eight
times warmer than sheep's wool and it's softer than cashmere. So people will
make hats and gloves and coats out of Kibbut. It's very expensive but it
It keeps you warm for a really long time.
Should note, chat, they're doing the Winnie thing,
where it looks like they're all in this small holding area,
but the gate's just open.
They're just, oh, it's a little foot out, okay.
Yeah, that guy's scratching.
No, okay.
Yeah, they will use whatever they can to scratch on.
That's hilarious.
And these guys are like very tough
and they have really big attitudes
and they are really, really strong.
So you notice their enrichment is all like extra tough stuff.
They've got big tires in here, car wash brushes.
They're not getting little pinatas like Cobuck.
They would run right through those.
Get some booty scratches over there.
Good shot, good shot.
All right.
Catchy.
This guy's giving us a glam shot over here too.
So beautiful.
Oh, we've got another scratching situation going on over there, using the horn to scratch
the hoof on the fence line.
Oh, wow.
I can't tell if he's, I think he's shooting that already, yeah, wow.
Another crazy itching.
Oh, we've got an itching right up here, too.
I guess it's an itchy day for the muskox.
How funny!
Is Suni and Nami, Sora?
Are they eating?
In this enclosure?
with the grain bowls it looks like they might have just gotten fed so we'll do it in a circle like this
so if they all go to a bowl and move on to the next one they can just keep moving in a line
and nobody gets any attitude about their food but they have this whole yard here but it looks like
everybody's in the feed pen right now this is so funny in between the toes yeah you've got to
get those good scratchies. Oh yeah. Yeah. Explain. This is before, this is well before they had
Dr. Oakley as a veterinarian. So I had a lot of vet tech experience so I would work remotely with
with the veterinarians to try to stabilize Nami at the time.
So we did spend a lot of nights with her in the mosquitoes
and a little hut in the back there.
And now she's doing great.
She's still alive, which is freaking awesome.
It's so cool.
She's thriving out here.
Is that, did you work in what town?
Yeah, which is what you're gonna do.
Yeah.
Oh, getting some scratches in between the horns in the noggin there.
Yeah, I don't know.
Are you guys familiar with Dr. Oakley?
You can explain this better than me.
Dr. Oakley Yukon Vet?
Yeah, Dr. Michelle Oakley.
She's our head veterinarian here.
She's really well known.
She's the only all species veterinarian up in the Yukon.
Yukon and throughout a lot of Alaska here and she's really phenomenal. She's kind of like
the go-to person for all things. Alaska in wildlife and she's got a whole bunch of experience with
other wildlife species that are not just in Alaska. She had her own show. Dr. Oakley Yukon vet is
the name of the show. So a lot of folks know her from there and can sometimes get to see her
doing procedures. We did a
procedure with one of our musc
was here so some really,
really cool guests were really
excited to see her. So cool.
Yeah, that's a Nat Geo show
chat. We can keep on moseying.
We're going to follow some of
our muscox over here and soon
we'll end up at our bears
amphitheater where all the
care live. Yeah they make like a really low grunting sound like it's very deep
it's very intense and the babies sound like goats they sound like tiny baby
goats so when mom is calling for baby it's like a tiny little day and when mom
responds it's a really deep it sounds like a truck like a semi truck rumbling
Yeah, we kind of call them like living fossils or ice age relics because they've
looked roughly the same way that they look now for an estimated minimum the
last 10,000 years of Earth's history which other animals they have evolved
greatly in the last 10,000 years but living in the Arctic that environment
has not changed very much since the ice age so they haven't had to change
So they actually kind of are like woolly mammoth ice age critters. Yeah, it's definitely giving ice age
Yeah, whenever we have muskox babies they can
Make some like pretty bad sleeping in the bunkhouse at times if they're making their little goat noises
But there is an endearing side to it too. They're so key kind of forgive them
I always like to say the babies are shaped like animal crackers like they have no
Definition from their nose to their butt and they're all one shape and then they have legs
So they kind of shaped like an animal cracker
Yeah, they're just very thick critters they maybe do have more definition than we can see they just have such thick fur
Do you want a radio for bears? Yeah, maybe in like 15 minutes or so. Yeah. We're getting
our animal care team ready to feed some bears. Sweet.
You know, he does love it out here.
They're very lovable.
The eyes are so tiny.
Yeah, they've got kind of the eye situation going on where they've got those like sideways
pupils a little bit.
Do you know what their life span is in captivity?
In human care, it can usually be extended.
It's sometimes hard to come up with an estimate for wildlife's life expectancy in human care.
These guys in the wild, usually around their mid teens, anywhere from like 10 to 20, is
pretty average for these guys.
Half the body is just head.
Yeah, I know.
They've got really big like shoulder and muscle like things going on on their neck and on their back
and there's quite a few of Alaskan animals that have like a big, great big hump on their shoulder.
The wood bison have it, brown bears have it, these guys have it and a lot of times it's because
they use their heads like snow plows and they have big heads to get through the really dense
environments that we see up here or protect themselves. They've got to have a big head
for the big horns and headgear that they have so every time the animals have that like
big hump. It's usually just a giant muscle for a giant head to support whatever they've got going on.
Chow asked if they smell bad. They don't, I don't really smell anything. It's probably like cows.
Yeah, they, the name muskox is a big misnomer. They're not oxen. They're not really related to
cows. Like I said, they're mostly goats and sheep and they don't have musk glands like
the way some animals do. They don't have a happy female muskox run in there. They don't smell
any different than like other large animals. Of course they've got a little bit of a aroma to them,
but it's not anything like extra or out of the ordinary. They're so short. I can't get
on a short there. They're not really good at walking through deep snow. Whoa, whoa, whoa,
Zooming tiny legs zooming
Hello, I think they're so cute so much shorter than I expected I haven't seen one in person I would have thought
Especially after seeing the moose you're like, oh my god, there's a
about the pack mentality when like a predator comes around?
Yeah, so these guys, they are her and animals,
so the more muskox there are,
usually the happier they are.
And they're very protective of each other,
they're very loyal to each other.
And the way that they protect to themselves is,
if there's a predator or something that scares them,
they will put all of the cows or the females
in the middle, and all the babies in the middle,
and all of the males will face outwards
with their big menacing horns facing outward.
And then whatever predator comes up to them,
that's pretty intimidating.
If you're a wolf trying to come up to that,
they can definitely do some damage.
So oftentimes predators are scared away.
Like a medieval shield formation.
Yeah.
Sounds like the club.
Their protective mechanisms
or like their protective circle
is really good for natural predators.
It unfortunately works very terribly
against human predators
when they were at one point hunted to extinction in Alaska
and they have a really successful conservation reintroduction.
The state of Alaska brought over a herd from Greenland
and reintroduced them extremely successfully
and now they live in pretty healthy numbers out there
because when they get scared, they don't move
and they all stand in one spot.
So as you can imagine, when human predators are involved
it makes it very easy to kill a lot of muskats at one time.
You just say in the club.
So it sounds like in the club, yeah.
So you and Muskox's defense formation in the club?
Yeah, it's a thing that happens there.
So they surround you and you go in the center?
Yeah.
The good news on the outside?
Yeah.
Chad, isn't that a normal thing?
That's kind of a normal thing.
We go out with all our friends.
Girls dance in the middle, like at the club.
We got a club club.
Yeah.
It was just a passing game that I made it on.
adapting muskox mentality for more things.
Were people hunting them for meat and their peltes
or mostly meat?
Probably mostly meat, and then also using all parts of them,
like using their peltes as a secondary thing.
There's actually a muskox farm in Alaska
where they can sustainably and happily take the,
or like brush off the fur from the muskox
they have in their care.
So you don't shear them like sheep,
but you can see as they shed off,
you can brush it off of them.
Our musk ox are not at that point
where we can brush it off of them,
but we do collect some off of the ground.
They can provide quite a bit of meat.
The females can be usually around three to 400 pounds,
and then those males can be upwards of 600 pounds,
for sure.
We're going to see a lot of dead trees, and I forgot all about that, if you tell the chapter about it.
That's one of my favorite things to talk about. I'm a huge geology nerd, and it's kind of a geologic answer for why we have all these dead trees here.
It's not because we suck at taking care of trees. They were here way before AWCC was, so they have kind of an interesting story.
on Good Friday and at 1964, the second largest recorded earthquake was in Portage, Alaska.
I forget exactly what the magnitude was, but it was a pretty large earthquake and the ground
shifted in some places several inches and a lot of places several feet.
The town of Portage was destroyed and this whole area was inundated with seawater and
that seawater came through and it killed all the trees because it's got salt in it right.
And it also at the same time preserved them or it kind of like pickled the trees
and so now it's a ghost forest. So there's ghost forests and other places where there's a lot of
earthquakes but here we got a whole bunch of dead ghost trees of forest past. I've never heard
up here. Pickled in that context. Yeah my friend said it to me once and I was like oh my god you're right.
Huh. Or like salt water. Yeah. Pickled trees. Pickled trees.
Oh wow. This is me.
Yeah this is like one of the coolest parts of our property so we're going to go up onto our
bears boardwalk so you can walk right over top of our bears habitat and on one side we have our
black bears habitat and on the other side we have our resident brown bear habitat. You also get a
pretty stellar shot of our muskox and you get pretty nice mountain views on clear days like today.
All right chat we're on the boardwalk. High spy time we're looking for black bears on the
On the right side I believe brown bears on the left side.
Yeah on this side over here we've got our three brown bears and then on this other side we have two more black bears.
Okay the opposite one.
Cool.
And then there's a fence line underneath our feet and then there's kind of a buffer zone.
So the black bears and the brown bears are not hanging out together.
In some sanctuaries you might see that they're adaptable and they can do that in human care.
care. We just don't have it set up like that here at AWCC. Oh my goodness and we've got a black bear
right over here taking us news.
She's a happy camper down there, so again my eyes are I can tell you who this is.
taking a nice deep nap right there.
I believe that's our female black bear, her name is Uli.
She was actually orphaned in Juneau, Alaska.
She had just been found wandering the streets
without mom when she was really little.
So that's not a really good time for them to be without mom.
And we, I mean the state of Alaska scooped her up,
brought her into human care, and she's lived with us
ever since. She's 24 years old, so she's taking a pretty good map there.
She does, and all Black Bears are big blueberry fans. They can actually eat so many blueberries
that the fat in their body turns purple.
Wow.
Mm-hmm.
Gold, that is.
Yeah, she's taking a hard map.
Yeah, they do so our bears will hibernate. They typically are black bears will sleep
up in that cave over there. Of course.
When I was here in 2014, they would work through the night to build this and we saw
it come together through the bunkhouse doors. They would work day and night just like
two-man crew with excavators. What Max? Oh no it's fine. And this is just it's
even more beautiful now that everything is grown in and just latched in it like
seeing how it came together it's just beautiful. It's it's so well done.
Anyway Alvea skulls one day. Oh yeah we've got one of our resident brown bears
right behind us there. And from this distance that looks like one of our females that is
Patrone or Patty is what we call her. And she's 22 years old. She lives in here with
her brother who's also 22, they're twins. And then another brown bear who's 26 years
old oh and I'm seeing another round there in the distance on the other day
other side so yeah this is like the perfect shot
And so Patrone and JB is her brother, they, like I said, they're both 22.
They were orphaned near Willow, Alaska.
They were found up in a tree in the state of Alaska like everyone else brought them into
our care.
They lived with us since they were tiny little cubs.
And they're coastal brown bears.
So you'll hear me call all of our brown bears brown bears instead of grizzly bears.
Grizzly bears and brown bears, they are technically the same thing, but brown bears are grizzly
bears that live on the coast.
So they tend to get a lot larger because they eat more fish, they've got more fat and
protein in their diet, so they get a lot larger.
So they're the same thing, it just depends where you see them and you might see some
physiological differences between them.
So you'll see that the twins are going to be a lot larger than our other bear.
Her name is Hugo, she's 26.
She's a true grizzly bear.
She was found in the interior of Alaska.
Okay, look, dink-donk, on her dink-donk, she's a hugo.
I'm keeping my eyes peeled for her.
Yeah so in total for all of our
bears we have just a little over
twenty or twenty one acres for
our bears the brown bears in
particular have a little over
fourteen acres for the three of
them so if they don't want to be
around people they certainly don't
have to and if they don't want to
be around each other they have
plenty of places to get away
from each other. Oh and there's
King, that's JB, stands for Joe Boxer. That's our male brown bear. Huge. Yeah, he
sits right around a thousand pounds. He's not missing very many meals, and that's
our assistant curator, Alex, calling over the bears to get some of their
morning diet that we can feed them. If you've ever wondered what it's like to
call a bear. It's kind of like that.
Yeah, this head is so huge. Oh, this is cool.
Yeah, this gives you a good size difference of
the black bears are so much smaller than the brown bears. Connor,
Look at this size comparison.
And then, although we don't have any polar bears here.
Watch for the size comparison.
Yeah.
There are some in Alaska.
Brown bear size comparison.
Holy moly.
This one?
It's pretty big.
What about this one?
This is a polar bear.
We're learning bear safety protocol real early.
Huge.
You got a minty albacca over there.
You know what?
I actually can. I'm really tall. You can't though.
Okay, um, that's cool. I like that.
I'm not letting him come for me like that. Okay, don't get it twisted.
I can see over that.
I know it holds up really well people often ask us if this hut is where the
bears hibernate this is not their house it's just in there for them I don't
actually think any of them could fit through the doorway so it's mostly there
for them to sniff around and sleep on and I have seen them crawl on top of it
before so it's just a toy to them at that size all right it will we'll keep
on Mosey and we're going to go to the super special part of the bears, our sanctuary where we're going to feed the bears.
What?
Okay, we're going behind the scenes.
Oh Evan and Caitlin, thank you for the raid.
Thank you so much, appreciate that.
guys were in Alaska at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. This is not my
child. I did not have a kid.
Whoa!
You got my honor card.
Oh my God, she got hair there dude.
You ready?
Oh my gosh!
Good deal.
How are you going to do that? You got a baby on your back.
He's so cute.
Wow, super dad. He's got a baby sleeping on his back. Now he's got a kid on his shoulders.
He's no joke guys.
Whoa, bison!
Maya, he's half your size at like four years old.
Okay.
Keep talking, Chad.
I'm going to get Caleb to put the starling down.
Are there shifts working out for you guys?
Yeah, all three of them have been shift trained.
So there's a building back there where we can shift them
into there.
They each have their own spot in there
where they can get fed.
They have been trained, and they're comfortable in there.
We can close the door.
So if we need to clean up anything in their habitat
or if we just need to do a vet procedure,
we can just have one of them go in there.
It really helps us help them.
All right, I'm gonna ask Alex if she's ready for us over the radio.
All right, perfect.
I'm gonna ask Alex about the kiddos.
Okay.
Yeah.
Shut word up.
Alex, copy Alex.
We're gonna go behind the scenes to feed some brown bears right now.
Are we good to come back and also bring kiddos or have kiddos stay out here with someone?
Well, me and a doctor, we're doing our streets in Alaska, so we're getting to show you guys a little bit of the facility and where our donations are going, and the staff also is aware of that funders that we've been obviously in our super group before at, and they've set up this behind the scenes for us.
So that's what we're working on right now.
So this is an off exhibit portion of our habitat but folks can book the bear encounter to come
and be in this portion so you'll see there's no secondary fence line here.
And the only rules while we're back here will stay on the gravel, don't step on the grass
on either side and don't touch any of the fence lines and same with um, Heath will
just keep calm bodies calm voices
running around is something that there's really don't like that you guys are more than welcome to take as many pictures as you want while we're back here. We try as best we can to not turn our backs to the bears. Sometimes that can make them feel uncomfortable or agitated and you know this is their house we want to make them as comfortable as possible.
But other than that, it's really, really, really cool.
And also just with the kiddos, either going to that middle bear or the furthest bear.
They'll be very used to the little guys.
So here we have Hugo.
She's a 26-year-old brown bear, a grizzly bear.
She was orphaned north of the Arctic Circle and she's sniffing around. You see she's opening and
closing her mouth and licking her lips like that. That's her sniffing around. See what's going on.
She was the bear that I mentioned earlier that was orphaned because she had porcupine quills all
in her face and in her paws and when they're little or even when they're older there's not
really much they can do if they get a bunch of porcupine quills stuck in them so mom didn't
have any choice but to leave her behind and she just happened to be in the right place
at the right time some snow machineers were up on Hugo mountain where she was
left and they found her called the state of Alaska they cleaned her up and
brought her into our care and she's lived here for the last 26 years. She's
getting a little bit of celery. And Connor what is it about this bear that you
guys like? She's the sweetest bear I've ever encountered especially as a dumb
19 year old she was very forgiving and she what she used to orphan or not orphan
she used to foster cubs as well right? Yeah we she's done a lot in her life with
us here as far as like training wise and living with other bears she is is
pretty tolerant. She and she was just always the one that we would spend
extra time with could JB and Petrona bigger so you know they would get the
majority of the food. We didn't have this nice setup like you guys do now. So we
would have to like try to load up a bunch of food for JB and Patrona and then
take her off to the side and give her special attention so she could eat as
well. They have a much better system now. Again this is in 2014 so she was just
she was just the nicest, sweetest one and at the time we like had done like a
bunch of photo shoots and stuff like that for like Abercrombie and Fitch
and stuff like that. She was like just the the best one to have around. Yeah it's really weird.
And we can go meet our big boy over here too. He's the one we saw walking just a little bit ago.
Oh my gosh this is very huge. Holy cow. This is JB again the short for Joe Boxer.
him and his sister off to the left here. They're both 22 years old. They're the
ones that were orphaned near Willow, Alaska, so they are going to be those
coastal brown bears. And they're getting a pretty wide variety of food today. So
bears, like I mentioned earlier, they're omnivores. So they eat both plants and
animals. They get a pretty 50-50 split between the two in their diets here.
So it looks like he's getting some raw salmon. He's getting some celery and
some lettuce. It looks like we've got some melon and some berries on deck to be
thrown into his habitat here.
How much does he weigh? He weighs just around a thousand pounds. This is the
time of year where they're the heaviest right before hibernation and so right
now he's probably somewhere between 900 and a thousand pounds. Wow. Get a really
get a shot of his back paws there. They're pretty enormous.
Oh, yeah.
So coastal brown bears are what we saw in Catmai?
Exactly.
This was a little bigger, I think. Yeah.
Than the ones we saw in Catmai.
He's a pretty big boy. They the only place they typically get
Larger than then JB is Kodiak or a lot of folks have heard of like Kodiak brown bears
Those are the same as these guys
They just genetically are a little bit larger because they've been isolated on Kodiak Island for right 10s of thousands of years
Yeah.
Wow.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Like here.
JB.
Don't turn my back.
He went to go get the celery.
Could have him stand here if he wanted to, so.
They have a couple different, yeah, they have a couple different training queues.
training that we're observing right now is their stations. They eat in these spots, they know they
have to stay in these spots, but they actually have a couple other ones that help us take care of
them so anytime that we can ask them to move their bodies around or in a way that helps us
help them without having to go in and sedate them or disrupt their lives, it's a big win for us so
they can lay down and stand up and open their mouths. So we can do a couple of those and get
some shots of of JB standing up here.
Cool.
JB, up.
Wow.
How did you guys capture that?
How did you do this?
Yeah, so what happened there is I gave him the verbal and the visual cue.
He saw my hands go up and I gave him the verbal cue by asking him to do it.
Then once he did it he completed all the things that I was asking him to do he stood up on those back legs while he was looking at me
You heard that whistle that is what we call a bridge
So that's how he knows he's completed everything that I just asked him to do and then he knows if he hears the whistle
He's completed it. He knows a reward is on the way the reward is food that was thrown afterwards
So I can do it again with a different behavior too. He knows
is how to lay down.
Let me get some good salmon here.
Sorry if the whistle is loud on the mic there.
JB, down.
There we go.
And like I said, that's like, it looks really cool
and like is kind of a neat thing to see,
but also like it really helps us help them.
So like if we think something's going on
with like his tummy or maybe he's got a scratch there
And we're refers to, if he wasn't able to stand up,
we would have to sedate him in order to see what's going on.
And like, sedating the animals is a big deal
and takes a lot of resources and is a lot of stress on them.
So anytime that we can get away with not doing that,
if we asked him to stand up and saw,
oh, it's just a bunch of dirt on him,
or, hey, this is something a little bit more serious
that we're gonna have to deal with
that kind of helps us take care of them in a better way.
I know buddy, that's some good melon.
We'll see if he knows that I'm opening his mouth cue as well.
Let's see what...
He's not digging his salmon, so I'll reward him with this instead.
JB, open!
Let's go over top here.
Here and we'll grab a glove for you and you can toss a couple pieces to him as well.
Cool.
Let me go grab some.
Yeah, I was going to grab some gloves so that folks can...
Chad, what do you think?
You got any questions that I can rely?
Yeah, this is like...
These are the parts of my day where I'm like, whoa, it's unreal.
She's in lamb milk replacement, Chuck.
Here you go.
Thank you.
We'll be there for you there.
Hey, buddy.
What am I tossing?
Does it matter?
Doesn't matter.
Here we went at apple.
And if you want to try and go through the fence you can
over the fence and feel free to do it on the left or right side of him there he's
okay left or right side of him he'll move to get it especially if it's
something he wants some fresh Alaskan salmon for the Alaskan bears that's
nice I don't think he really wants a salmon but there you go there you go
He hates it.
Pear.
Some pear?
Pear.
And if anyone is noticing that he's like not wanting to eat his fish or not wanting to eat certain parts of his diet, that's totally normal for bears in human care and wild bears.
Wild bears that are really good at fishing, they won't eat the whole fish. They'll only eat like the choice parts, which for a bear is like the eyeballs and the brains and the eggs and the fatty parts.
some melon. And so he knows that if he doesn't eat this food he has only ever
experienced life where he's always gonna get more food so he's just gonna eat
exactly what he wants and the choicest parts to him. So he's just doing
exactly what a wild bear that gets a lot of food would do. You'll see bears in
the wild waste quote-unquote a lot of food because they'll just eat the
really choice parts. That's a great, oh that's a grape as well. That's a grape.
J.B. Yum. Oh, one grape in a mouth.
I'm gonna toss this lettuce to him. He makes some really good crunching sounds when the lettuce comes out.
I know, buddy.
Ooh, we almost didn't make it over the fence with that one.
Oh, maybe.
He's got his chicken leg out to the side right now.
Oh, he loves the oranges.
Orange, no peel.
That's nice.
Oh, sorry.
He's got it.
Yeah.
No.
Yes.
No.
I said it's because I said he loves the oranges.
He's like, I'm going to show Ron.
JB.
What about chicken?
Like a drumstick?
Fish?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Crazy.
So what are their names? This is Hugo and JB and then...
That's Patron or Patty.
Yeah, so these are the two that are twins.
And then she's a little bit older.
She often gets mistaken as like, this is like Mom, Dad and Cubby.
cubby but it's really twins brother and sister and then a little bit older roommate in the same spot as them
a single strawberry you might go for it he seems to be into the fruit today
oh whoa stretch sorry oh my gosh that's slow too far down here i'll go again
Too far? Yeah, that's right. He's really giving you a tough time today.
Maybe. Oh, what the heck, mister? Oh, maybe I'll lean for it for that. It's also the time of year
when they start to slow themselves down. So in August, they are really going through a phase
called hyperphagia, which is a fancy way of saying that like, all they do is eat. All they
they care about his food. They'll only do things that get them more calories and then they actually
start to wean themselves out of that before they go into hibernation. Yeah, feel free to throw that
one over the top there otherwise it'll get stuck. Nice. Oh gosh. Exploded. Oh, he loves the grapes.
It's a great party. Hand in the grapes. Yeah, they have really gentle mouths when they're
eating they've got prehensile lips and that's like the same way that they'll eat fish eggs in the
wild they do like one at a time like mum mum mum mum pick up each individual one and take their
sweet time. How much yeah how much do they eat like is this a daily of multiple times a day?
Yeah so right now they're getting fed twice a day um it varies by year I know by the end of the
year last year JB was getting 15 pounds of food just in the afternoon. Okay I think he didn't
get quite up to that this year so I think this is probably somewhere between like 8 and 10 pounds
and then this is just their morning diet here and they'll get another afternoon diet.
Absolutely I have another glove for you here if you need a larger one let me know
but we can absolutely switch out and there's some pieces of fish in here feel free to grab
the apples are a couple of the berries right yeah so for reference yeah he'll
probably love some of the blackberries too that's like a special treat for them
yeah go for it oh nice oh yeah see he likes those oh sweet was she happy yeah
yeah I think they're they're ginormous blackberries yeah wild bears eat a ton
of berries they can eat upwards of 20,000 calories a day just in berries you
He got him right on the nose!
He's got some raspberry on his nose!
Yeah, he loves the grapes.
Yeah, absolutely. And feel free to toss it.
Yeah.
That's okay. He'll grab it through there.
For him, he honestly probably doesn't feel it.
We try and do it on either side of him, but it doesn't really face him.
see their claws there. They're usually about three to five inches long on brown bears here.
They've got those like perfect teddy bear shaped ears. They're a little bit smaller than black bear
ears. And they've got those really wide enormous feet. Like the classic bear paw print is actually
usually a brown bear print. So Kobuk who we saw all the way back in the beginning. His paws
are probably not that much bigger than my hands versus JB's paws are probably about the size
of my head, so for reference they're just a lot larger.
Like his head is huge. Yeah, he's got a big noggin for sure, and so does his sister Patron.
She has a very large, this is all coming from my heart, she has a very large forehead.
That's usually how we can tell her apart from the distance. I took for the forehead.
I see.
Wow, Chad you hear that?
And we can go visit Patron if we want to.
Cool, yeah. Nice buddy.
We can trade these here.
Patrons want to trade these?
Are you serious?
Okay, JB has just a little bit more, so he's good.
That's really cute.
That's epic.
Is that cool?
Yeah, Patrall. That's awesome.
And once they realize that all of their diet has been fed out,
they'll probably come back.
They'll probably come back and eat everything else that they have left behind.
So they'll eat all their favorites first, leave what they don't want, maybe take a
lap around their habitat and then come back to their spot and hoover up the rest.
I want to go home.
Can you bear with her?
I want to go home.
Yep.
Go home.
You go a little bit more.
You go.
Yep.
Let's go see if you go.
Caleb's talking to Tom in his life.
Mm-hmm.
Especially him.
He'll kind of walk off.
Hi.
Yeah.
She's a little...
26, huh?
Hey.
How do you guys, do they get their kibble in goals?
Or do you spread it out?
We'll just spread it out.
Cool.
for her because she's slower.
They try to get it to her kind of one spot,
so she can do a little bit faster.
Of course, when they do that,
she likes to get all of her light first.
Eventually, they're final.
Animal Care staff is here. Hi, guys.
What's up?
She has like a more dainty personality about her, she's just like a lot more chill than
those two.
Yeah, that's a lot of bear over there.
This is more like the size I feel like the ones we saw were, like they felt, maybe she's
even smaller, but this is more like what I would expect them to look like close up.
That bear in the middle was massive.
Why is her name Hugo, do you know?
I found near Mount Hugo, he said.
Port defines the whales in our mouths.
I'm not sure if it's because they're really close to marine, but she has a forkage and a little bit of a tear.
She has a lot more lippies too.
Orange.
It takes small bites out to investigate all of those.
Orange, yeah.
Is that your favorite spot for these cold days?
The one with the fish that's left here today?
Where do you guys get your salmon?
Mostly donations.
That's awesome.
Yeah, it's really nice.
The bait come over and they'll clean up the creatures.
Um, he said their donations, this is last year's fish, they don't accept donations over two
years old.
I think they could hear him, maybe.
Do you guys do any enrichment for them in here?
I'm pretty sure, but we're giving them carcass pieces.
Yeah.
And they usually will take it wherever they want,
stash it for later, eat it later, then.
It's a really high value item for them.
They give them different pieces of the animal every time.
Helps them figure out a new way to eat something.
Cool.
Small bear.
Oh, great. Great party.
Grapes.
Yeah, everybody loves grapes.
What do you think, Chuck?
It's really impressive how tactile they are with their mouths.
I know.
Sick.
Is she spayed or are they, she is?
Actually, I'm not sure if the girls are fixed
or if she's spayed or if no, she's spayed.
Okay.
But we don't want any cubs in here.
Because the carnivores born in Caculea
can never go back out for a while
without intensive programs for rewilding,
which we are not equipped for.
And then if we were to get another bear,
we would not space for them if there were cubs out here.
So we wouldn't want to avoid that situation.
So that we're not forcing another bear through not
to have somewhere to live.
Okay, let's do a kibble drop.
Try not to use petting bears.
Nobody's petting or hugging bears.
People keep saying they want to pet and hug the bears.
I'm saying you want to pet the bear as a starling gets it.
Nobody's petting or hugging bears.
Yum, kibble.
Now you got it.
Moose, thank you for the $150 donation.
Oh, seven, the one piece of lettuce.
one piece of lettuce. What's the kibble? Is it Missouri bear? Is it bear or is it carnivore?
It's just a dog, my understanding is that we tried bear kibble, bears were like ew.
That's so funny.
No thank you.
They're so funny.
Cool.
Wow.
Yeah, absolutely, I can bring you a lot of stuff here, but yeah, we're doing the life
Looks like these are cool.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, let me grab these from you.
Thank you, Alex.
Patron's just got a little bit of her kibble left.
Hey.
And I'll take everyone to the end of the hallway.
Cool, huh, chat?
Bear, big bear.
I'm glad you got to spend some time with Hughie Bear.
Reconnect with an old pal.
That's so awesome.
Everybody's got special animals when you do keeping your animal
care of sorts.
Connor says that's his in his top five.
Yeah, you definitely like of course we love all of our animals but each individual animal care person
has an individual that they get really close to which is just a really special part of the job
and about being part of that community.
Are any of the animals at all this in your top five? It's okay if you say no.
Really? Wow, that's fascinating.
And it's not, it's not even like a children's picking favorites thing.
Sometimes you just like connect with certain individuals like people, you know,
carmen have a special connection.
We'll have this cave back this way. We'll do a little backtracking.
Alrighty.
That's how I feel every single time.
We don't have any more open programs today, unfortunately.
Needle.
No.
Sydney, that cockatoo.
We, since we're not running this program anymore, I can't say.
One more.
You can go online a little more at the gift store, but today and for the rest of the summer
we don't have any.
Probably my first, the first pony I ever rode.
She's dead now.
Does that count?
All right.
We can do this last little loop here and then we can cruise our way all the way back
to the start.
Cool.
We've just got a couple more animals.
You can see most of them from right where we are while we were back there
We were really up close and personal with our elk. Yeah
Elk are actually not a native
Species to Alaska they're an introduced species and they only live on like four little islands
down in southeast Alaska and
The ones in our care
They're a genetic mix of Rocky Mountain and Roosevelt Elk
So they're like a special third species here and that there's a little calf right pretty close
There's four new elk calves and Papa Pedro is in there with his really big
beautiful antlers. Holy cow. They're just over like four feet tall. Which you know
from this distance they already look impressive up close. They're like almost
as tall as I am. Yeah it's like the two of us are each and
half. Yeah. So you can imagine when he sheds them it's like the fastest 80
he's ever lost. That must feel awesome. Yeah he looks really derpy after because
his neck is all beefed up to hold his antlers and then when they drop him off
his head his timing his neck is huge. But this is a little calf with like a
mohawk situation going on here. Oh my gosh it's so cute. I'm fluffy.
What do they do with the shed antlers, they ask?
So we do a whole bunch of stuff.
The really nice, perfect ones.
We have a fundraiser in the springtime called Paint an Antler, where folks can come and
paint antlers and buy them and take them home.
A lot of times the antlers, when they come off like there's broken parts or there's
actually parts that have like gotten really nasty and gross, so we can't always
use that for that we use it for enrichment so we could take like an elk antler and spear some
salmon and grapes and stuff all over it and throw it in there or even like a porcupine loves antlers
because they chew on them it's a really good way for them to get salt and minerals so we'll put
it in other animals habitats cool that's a really great renewable resource for us
and you'll see there's two more elk calves up just to the right of Pedro
sitting by that one cow elk there. They do a lot of baby sitting behaviors here
in the elk yard where one mom will watch all of the babies and then the
rest of the moms can relax and eat and then they'll trade out which mom is
watching the baby so they do a lot of like community child care in the elk yard
which I think is super cool. That's nuts. Yeah. So cool.
I lost my job.
Baby sitters, what are the antlers made of?
So antlers are made of bone, mostly.
There's a little bit of keratin, like what our fingernails are made of, in there, but
they're mostly bone, and they grow straight out of their skull.
So when they shed them off, they calcify over, and they just have like two little
lumps left behind, and then they plunk off their head, but they're literally growing
new bone.
So that's why when they grow and they have that fuzzy stuff on it
It's you know
They have blood vessels and all of that stuff in there to get nutrients to the whole rest of the antler
Is there a lot of blood when they shed? Yeah, it can look usually when they shed the velvet. It's kind of bloody and nasty
and it looks
Narglier than it is like it usually doesn't really hurt them. It's just uncomfortable and itchy
Yeah, and then when they shed the antlers off
It can be clean sometimes
there's like a little spot that didn't calcify over all the way and there's a little bit of blood
and again it usually doesn't hurt them it's just like uncomfortable more than anything
but it can look kind of devastating yeah yeah have you guys seen videos of them shedding antlers
shot it literally like they'll go like this and just pop off yeah it's so crazy it usually spooks
them because they're like oh my god what fell off my head. So cool. And these are our caribou here.
I mentioned we have reindeer and caribou in our caribou. We keep them separately.
Reindeer and caribou they're the same species but reindeer are the semi domesticated version of
caribou. So these guys are a little bit leaner, a little bit taller, their antlers are a little
bit smaller, and this is an all-female herd here and you'll notice that one all the way on
On the left that's Luna. She doesn't grow antlers. We don't really know why.
She kind of marches to the beat of her own drum, so she's a special exception to the Everybody Grows Antlers rule.
But other than that these guys are exactly the same as our reindeer that we saw earlier.
Cool. Moss, thank you so much. We can go all the way around the loop if we want and see the water.
It can sometimes get windy over there, so I don't know if...
Okay.
But then we'll make our way back around and we'll see our wood bison at the end.
Yeah, let's go see it. There is a fully articulated beluga whale skeleton in there, so like let's
go show it off.
That's so cool.
We did.
Really?
Awesome. We, I think we saw belugas here earlier. We're part of the Alaska Beluga Monitoring
Program, so that's a volunteer community science-led project through NOAA Fisheries
and a couple other partners, and there's monitoring sites along the Ternigan arm, which is a body of water up here,
and then down further on the Kenai Peninsula to monitor for the presence of Cook Inlet beluga whales,
which are special genetically distinct population of beluga whales that live down here in south central Alaska.
So we'll have monitoring times around Hytide to go and see if there's whales here.
cool yeah chat we saw well I saw one Connor saw two as we were driving and it's just like a little
white hump that comes out of the water but it's still so neat sometimes you can hear them too
they're called canaries of the sea because they make a whole bunch of different like moves and clicks
and snorts and stuff it's very cute that's so cool we are hoping to get one or like some sort of
device that allows us to monitor their vocal sounds because that's one of the
like most unique things about them and what's so special about them that's
awesome
good job
This is also a really good spot for us to see like glaciers from across our property.
So there's glaciers in that direction.
There's a glacier up here on this peak.
There's a blue glacier over there.
That's called Explorer Glacier.
This peak up here is called Flying Cornice, which I think is really fun.
We've been fundraising throughout this stream and we got to, we're at $46,000 when
we streamed, when we adapt streamed, and we just hit $50,000.
Oh my gosh, thank you guys so much for your donation sir at the stream. That's incredible
We are extremely extremely grateful for it. I mean
We working here is would be allowed these animals to have a second chance at life
And we can only do that if we have the resources to be able to give that to them
So just on the animals behalf in their lives and their quality animal care. Thank you guys
Thank you so much chat. It's so cool
So cool.
We're going to talk about cool conservation stories, the wood bison, yeah, that's coming
up.
Yeah, we'll talk about wood bison to get to, guys.
The wood bison are pretty neat.
While we're over here, I'll talk about another really cool conservation project that we have
going on that we're a part of, I should say, so a species that's not directly in
our care, but we see come up to our property, our Rufus Hummingbirds, and they weigh less
than a nickel, or the weight of a nickel, and they're a little bit less than four inches
wide in wingspan, and they make some of the biggest migrations of any animal in the whole
world for their body size. They fly from northern Mexico up to southern Alaska up here to
breed and they fly all the way back down and they have had like a 70 to 75 percent decline in their
population over the last 30 to 50 years. So there's a lot of conservation efforts in order to make
tuck it in this way. Yeah, there we go. Perfect. Yeah, I know it gets windy over here.
And so we see them up here. We put hummingbird feeders out really regularly in the summer
in order to see them on our property. And we have been working with a couple other partners.
Some bird banders will come out and band birds on our property, which is really, really cool.
And this year we started to be part of Alaska Humtrak, where the bird banders, the parts of
their work are still going on. So banders from the banding coalition of the Americas is an
an organization that will come out and bring scientists that will come and
ban these birds, but we can also now put trackers on these birds and they're tiny
tiny telemetry devices that weigh less than a grain of rice. Yeah. And it's
basically like a backpack for the hummingbird. They can choose to take it
off where if it's hummingbirds can reach every single point on their body
with their feet. So if they want to take it off, they can just rip it
right off. If they don't, we are able to actually watch their flight path and
learn what are the most critical habitats for them. So where they're nesting, where
they're stopping on this enormous migration and what's causing this
really strong population decline. So how do they, how does the battery work on those?
They're solar powered. What? And the way they ping is off of anything that has
Bluetooth, so any IoT device on the phone could ping the tracker from a hummingbird that's
I think within a hundred feet of you and then it sends that data to a base where they can
see what's going on and it's just really really cool stuff.
this is the point it is in my opinion the most beautiful spot on our property you
get pretty epic views in this building right here opened this spring this is
the Mattson Ocean Education Center and we've got a really cool beluga sculpture
out here so even though we don't see them that's what they look like.
Chat baby belugas said are gray, right?
Yeah so when they're born they're really dark gray and then as they age they
turn white so it's actually pretty easy to tell
roughly what age a beluga is based on the color that you see if the lighting
is right when you see them.
Yeah, we can go in.
Alright, Caleb, stay here.
Yeah, I should be good.
That's me.
Is that wood?
Yeah, it's Jordan Anderson is the artist, I believe,
and it's carved of wood.
The thing is super neat.
Yeah, so this is the Matts and Ocean Education Center, we're hoping to like run educational
programs in this building and have folks come out and learn about beluga whales.
This skeleton here is real.
This is a fully articulated hook inlet beluga whale skeleton that was found down near
the Kenai Peninsula. It's a juvenile adult female that had been stranded and there are
actually students down on the Kenai Peninsula that put the skeleton all back together and
cleaned it over a course of a year or two years and built it into this like really gorgeous
armature for us. And so now she gets to live here and see the water and who will get
to learn about really cool whales.
I'm going to show them screen here.
There was some oil footage.
That's where we are.
We're in that building right now.
That's where we are, but drone footage of it.
That's kind of crazy.
Okay.
Yeah, this is data from NOAA fisheries that shows their population decline.
So starting pre-1990, there was an estimated roughly 1,300 cooking libeluga whales.
They never had a terribly large population because cooking was not that big, but they
are just a genetically distinct population that lives here.
And you can see a massive decrease in population over the last 30 years or so.
And there's a pretty wide list of reasons why their population has declined.
Most of it is loss of habitat and quality of habitat.
And they're really sensitive to noise, so being a population of belugas that lives
near people. Being close to Anchorage, Alaska's only really big town kind of
disrupts their daily life because they use echolocation to find food, to talk
to each other, to move around in this inlet with all of these tides and
channels. So they're really voice-sensitive critters.
All right, back outside.
It's a nice deck.
It is a nice deck.
It's pretty, right?
Yeah, it's beautiful.
It's a cinema, okay cinema.
It's nice out here.
They can get like super super windy out here. So like this is a light breeze for the point.
No, it's nice.
They can get like 100 mile an hour winds out here.
Everything that goes out here has to be super windproof.
I heard we've gotten really lucky with the weather.
Yeah, pretty much any day you see the sun you're a lucky duck.
Yeah.
Hi Eddie.
Hi, how you doing?
Cool, so when was this built?
This the project was just completed this spring I believe the opening was like April
or May in the middle of May or so.
So brand new took about three years to build.
Building anything in Alaska is a pretty difficult task.
And as you can imagine, pretty expensive.
This is also, we're kind of on a river delta here,
our property.
So building something on that particular spot
is a pretty big feat.
We were pretty stoked that it could end up, you know,
looking how we wanted it to.
Yeah, that's awesome.
How are you having a good day?
Yeah, I can imagine there were like many, many, many roadblocks in its conception,
but the day that it opened was pretty special for us.
And then the last critter that we're going to pass is our Woodbison.
Cool! These guys are kind of an exception to a lot of the rules that I've said kind of applied
to the animals in our care. These are the only animals in our care that might make it back out
into the wild. So if you're not a Woodbison, this is your permanent home. If you're a Woodbison,
This could be your permanent home but maybe not. So we're part of the Woodbison reintroduction project
and Woodbison are native to Alaska. They used to roam in hundreds of thousands of numbers strong
and they were actually globally declared extinct in 1941. There were no more Woodbison left to
Alaska. We thought there were no more Woodbison left in the entire world until about 15-ish
years after they had been declared extinct, someone was flying a bush plane over a really
remote part of Alberta, Canada. And they looked down and I saw a bunch of brown dots on the ground
and they were like, what the heck is that? And so they got closer and they were like, holy crap,
it's wood bison. And somebody found the last wild herd of wood bison. So big day for that guy.
Yeah. Immediately went to the state and was like, hey, they're not extinct. We were wrong.
Yeah, and Canada actually started the Woodbison reintroduction project within Canadian borders and
Alaska very shortly after started the exact same project. So they took that last wild herd into human care
They live in Elk Island Canada now Canada
Let Alaska have a couple of those wood bison and
AWCC in
2003 I believe was designated. I guess we can hop down here get closer to these guys
was designated as the caretakers for the herd while they grow, get happy and
healthy. So we're in charge of making sure that we're making genetically diverse
bison that are not super accustomed to people so they can eventually make it
back out into the wild. Yeah, wow, big job. Yeah, it is pretty cool and these
guys are big animals. The male wood bison are the largest land animal and
And the entire Western Hemisphere, the bulls get just up over 2,200 pounds.
The ones we're looking at right now are deceptively small.
A lot of these guys are the adult females, the cows, and the one, two, and three-year-olds.
Or some that are just a couple of weeks to a couple of months old.
So these guys are a little bit on the smaller side.
The bulls are quite a bit larger.
Got it.
Ace is like 900 pounds shot for reference.
200 pounds is no joke. Have you guys done any releases of introductions yet?
Yeah, so the project is all managed by the state. The first release was in 2015. 130 individuals
from AWCC were released into the wild into the Inoko River area. And then the last release
was just last spring in 2025. Another, I want to say, 17 individuals were taken from our herd.
They met up with a couple other individuals from another facility that's part of the project,
and they were released into the lower Tananaw River area. Okay, cool. Wow. Only got babies.
Yeah, so that bright orange one up there, that is a calf from this year. They're bright orange
when they're born and then they turn brown and the two right to the left of it are also calves
from this year that we're just going a little bit earlier so they're already brown.
Hello, bison.
So this is a younger one and both the girls and the boys will have these horns
and we always get the question like what's the difference between a wood bison and a regular
bison. A regular quote-unquote bison is usually a plains bison. Those are the ones that live like
in Yellowstone and like down in the rest of the lower 48. And those guys are just a couple hundred
pounds smaller than the wood bison. And the wood bison, like brown bears and like the muskox have
a really big hump on their back shoulders and it's just a neck muscle because they use their
heads like snow plows. Can you tell them the difference between bison and buffalo?
Yeah, so a lot of it is like a linguistic difference. People will sometimes call these
guys buffalo. Their scientific Latin name or like common English science name is wood bison.
But by species, these guys are pretty much the same. When Europeans came over to North America
and saw these guys, there are no bison over there. There are types of buffalo.
and they saw these guys and thought this is buffalo so they started calling them that
but these guys really are the same thing. There are like water buffalo in Africa and other places
genetically or evolutionarily. These guys are somewhat similar to them but it's really a
linguistic difference and you'll hear people call them buffalo.
You talk about why would bison are important to the ecosystem?
Yeah, so these guys are a keystone species.
Obviously, anytime that there's an animal this large in the ecosystem, they have a pretty
big impact.
These guys, like any other animal, they are food for other animals and for people.
You can imagine an animal that weighs 2,200 pounds, provides a lot of food to the animals
that are around it, big predators that are also having a hard time surviving without them.
A really great example also is really big animals make a lot of poop and their poop helps fertilize
the grounds that they live on. Grazing from these guys also helps the ecosystem by leveling
everything. It prevents one type of species of plant from taking over an entire field.
When they level the field it allows other mostly native plants and wildflowers to regrow
and kind of levels the playing field for plants. They also do a thing called wallowing.
So with that big hump on their back they anytime they want to scratch their back or get flies off
they want to take a little dust bath they'll roll around on the ground and the big hump
on their back makes a depression in the ground and then that allows water to collect rain
water, glacial melt, and it brings water into places that might otherwise be pretty depleted of
water, like lowland and open tundra areas. Wow. Yeah, so they actually will also create water pools
for other animals, other plants, and they've got just kind of a whole bunch of things that they
they can be connected to.
Neat.
How many other facilities have wood bison?
As far as I know, there's only one other facility
that's up in Fairbanks called LARS
that has wood bison in Alaska.
But it could be wrong.
There could be other places that have them.
But as far as I know, it's just the one other one.
And is the hump made of fat or muscle or bone, they ask?
It's a muscle.
Yeah, so not like a camel hump.
It's more just like if you only worked out like your neck and shoulder muscles and didn't
work out anything else, you would be the same shape as them.
Yeah.
Crazy.
Cool.
So cool.
This is not a rerun chat.
We're live.
the big cracks in the ground
these are tied guts they're
naturally occurring since we
get really high tide fluctuations
here and so when it's high tide
it fills with water and it
actually goes underneath the
road here and it ends in the
bears habitat so wild fish will
swim up there and then our
bears can go fishing and play
part in the greater ecosystem, even though they're in human care.
That's so cool.
Which I think is like the coolest part of their habitat.
Yeah, for sure.
And the wood bison like to play in the tide gut.
The little babies will run around in there.
Sick.
So is it a safe program, technically or now, with the wood bison?
not okay. Same vibes, same same point. Yeah all of it is run by the Alaska
Department of Fishing Game. Okay. Wow. They're even the ones like they select
which individuals in our care go out. They decide like when and where and how
they get released. Right. They have all those resources. Such a trip. Yeah. You can imagine.
No, you have to fly them?
So yes and yes.
The way that they're transported is there's connexes, like big shipping containers that
have been specially retrofitted for their needs.
So they have air conditioning and they have hay troughs and all that good stuff.
And they're put in there, the cows and the babies go together.
And then they, when they were brought out to the Onoko River area, they were put
on a barge and floated like 400 miles out there or the bulls were floated out
there because they were too heavy to go on the airplane. The cows and the babies
went in a plane from Anchorage and flown out there.
Oh the whole herd is over here. They heard one of our vehicles and they were
like lunchtime? Lunchtime?
Oh yeah, just got one little patch of orange left.
Wow, how cute is that chat?
Getting a little bath and just got the tiny little horns poking out of her head.
I actually think that little calf is a boy.
Do you know what their population is at now?
Like the number?
I don't. So the state will monitor them. When they first go out, they have these big leather
tracking collars on them. The bulls usually take those off within a year or so, and they do aerial
surveys of them. So that first population, they were steady. They had a couple pretty devastating
winters and had some population decline. I believe they're steady again, or even increasing.
Yeah, that little calf is trying to nurse. Get some lunch.
It's an Arctic Winnie.
Arctic Winnie? Yeah, people are saying Winnie's cousins. They are Winnie vibes. Yeah.
Little drama.
Blanket. Amazing. So cool. Elemental, thank you for the 20. Are the ear tags to tell them
apart? Yeah, so that's how we like double check that we know what each individual in
our care is getting like medication wise or healthcare wise. It's also how what side
there on helps us tell from afar if it's a boy or a girl. But yeah, each individual will have a
different number. So if one of them needs medication, like we know 100% that Bison 331 right here is
getting exactly what they need if we need them to. They asked, yeah, the sound is them.
That low grunting, that kind of sounds like APA from Avatar, that is them.
Do you know what those vocalizations mean or are they just chatting?
Yeah, they're just chatting. It could be anything. It could be like, I love being a bison. I'm happy that there's grass.
It could be that one of them wants one of them to move away. It could be one of them wants them to move closer.
Yeah, they make all sorts of like deep vocal grunts like that, but it could be anything.
Lazy, thank you.
We have Marma sets at our facility and their names are Appa and Momo.
That's adorable.
That's so cute.
But they don't sound like that.
They scream.
Real and true, they told me that themselves.
Chad, we're coming up on the end of our tour here at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation
and I do have any final questions to ask also what did you think? Have you had a
good time? Are you stoked? There's still more to do. Yeah okay. Yeah we can mosey
our way back here. There's maybe one or two more animals that we can see on our
way back. Cool. So we've got the muskox feeding ray. Yeah we're gonna walk kind of
all the way back to where we started. We're gonna go and see some babies. We're
going to see baby muskox. We might see a little black bear cub that has recently
come into our care back there. Make sure we don't get hit by a car on the way over there.
Yeah, we do. It's like a daily thing that we do. So we partner with Forest Service because
we're surrounded by Forest Service land and we'll go browsing, which is where we just
go out with a big old truck and in areas that the Forest Service is already trying to like
mitigate the plants that live there we will cut branches for all of our animals that eat leaves.
So our moose will get fresh leaves every day, the reindeer and the caribou, the elk,
all of those guys will get fresh stuff. Oh this is still the same enclosure?
Yeah so this is just one of their yards and then that big yard that we walked around to get
to the Matt's Inelection Education Center,
that's another bison yard.
And we rotate them between those two yards
and then another yard right up front
so that they can graze.
Yep, that's where we keep the bowls.
And then we don't, oh, then we lease it
from the Forest Service.
Yeah, you might be able to see it from over here.
If you get the angle right.
There's a tough one.
Yeah, I can't imagine the vegetation
was probably pretty thick over there.
Do you rotate that one, claw, or how do you move up?
So it's a process to move them.
They have really good herd mentality,
and we use that to get them to move.
So they'll be motivated to follow a vehicle,
so we'll have someone on our four-wheelers
or on our big defender vehicles,
will lead them over there.
And as long as you keep calm body behavior,
they're all calm, they'll follow you right in there.
It's something that we do pretty often.
So we've got the process pretty fine tuned.
While we're walking back,
I don't know if any of them are visible.
These are a set of black tailed deer.
We currently have three of them in our care.
And they've never even heard of a black tailed deer.
Yeah, they're really only live in portions of southeast Alaska,
so we don't even really see them in the wild up here very much.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, cute.
It's like a white-tailed deer.
Yeah, they're a little bit smaller than white-tailed deer,
but other than that, very, very, very similar.
One of our females.
Cute.
She's got an Easter egg.
Yeah, there's probably some yummy snacks in there.
We sprayed them with some smelly scents for them to sniff on.
That's cool.
Alright, I'll see if they're ready for us to go visit some babies.
One of three mule deer subspecies.
Huh.
The more you know.
Alex, that deer laid an egg. No, that is enrichment for the deer. They do not lay eggs. Yes.
Good. We are making our way back to the farmhouse road. Now we are at Muscox if you're ready.
Copy. Let me see how much longer I have on this. Stand by.
Happy no worries
Amazing at Chris will be over to the farmhouse in about five minutes or so
Thank you, thank you in my top five cutest baby animals but like on earth I have
Chinchillas? Ooh. Skunks? Yes. Moscox.
No.
Chia, I've gone through this before. What else have I said?
To follow.
No. No.
goat. Yeah. Baby goat. That I can believe. If the muskox are in there, the goats got to be in there.
Yeah. Yeah, like...
Unfortunately, chat vultures are not in it. I do love them so dearly. Emus could be in it.
Yeah. Baby emus are so cute. Oh my gosh. But it sounds adorable.
They're so cute. Yeah, maybe that's my top five. Owls are also not in it, respectively.
Yeah, baby muskox are ridiculous. Yeah, they very quickly came into my, probably like top three
favorite baby animals. Yeah. I've never seen a baby marmot. I would like to throw in the ticket
for a baby porcupine. Oh fair. They're called porcupettes. Yeah. And they're
like billiard ball size and they're just fluffy and then their eyes and that's it.
They have nothing else. And they have a really it's it's it's like a
puggle or something. Yeah, something like that. Something adorable. Oh baby
of rabbits are also really cute. That's a good one. But they have to get past
the scary stage. They're pinkies and they're a little they gotta get fur and
they have to open their eyes but once they get there so cute. We can we can go
either way if we want to go not in the parking lot or it's quicker to go through
this way.
Baby koalas, baby toucan, baby toucans look fake.
Oh yeah.
Looks so animatronic and weird.
Alright, and then we can sneak in front of these cars to make our lives a little easier.
Shoot baby donkeys.
Man.
Man, I can't do this anymore, guys. I don't know.
So inside is Max leaving us.
Um, we will be leaving that. I mean, Max lives here, guys.
We will be leaving Max, which is devastating.
Alright, we're going to go back over to Cobuck.
That's where we're going to access Baby City, that's where all the little babies live.
Shout out we're going to Baby City.
It's my personal favorite part of working here.
Bring Max back to Texas.
Max has a family.
I want to point out while we're over here as we're passing by, this is our animal infirmary.
Becky can show you where the new animal clinic is going, but this is our current infirmary.
It has everything we need to give our animals all the healthcare that they need. There's,
you know, it doesn't look like the biggest building in the world, but quite a few of
our animals can fit in there, like our black bears can fit in there. Wow. And behind there
is our quarantine pen. So if animals need to be separated from the herd or
when they come in they're always under quarantine for a certain amount of time they live back there
and also our orphan pen is back there so anytime we get little babies that need some extra attention
they go behind the infirmary. And so anyone who's a fan of Dr. Oakley has maybe seen this building on
her shows before.
Thank you.
Anonymous, say with a five.
Thank you!
We're on our way back, Chris.
There's a dog eat back here.
What's the dog's name again?
Um, trying to see who that is. That's either Riley or Rip back there.
It's Remy.
It's Erica, right?
You guys hear that right there?
close-up of Cobuck there, who was the first animal we saw.
Yeah, there's Dearest who we saw sleeping at the beginning. He's like, hey, what are you
guys doing over there? What's going on? Can I do it? And here's two more of our
reindeer that I mentioned earlier. This is Neville and Holly are in here.
There's a river making some cool noises up there.
Did you hear that?
Look at this.
And here she is.
Baby muscat.
Did you hear that?
Look at this thing.
And here she is, baby Muscat.
Look at this little thing.
Tractor.
Oh my god. Hello, hello.
Oh my gosh, just some nice fire wings.
What the hell?
That's not real.
Hang it up.
Oh, oh, oh, trauma.
Yeah, if we can.
Just, what's that?
All right, so, Chris is gonna, this is Brooks.
She's baby Muscox.
Suni is her mom.
We're gonna do a bottle feeding and then feed her some browse, some fire weed, which
which is a really pretty Alaskan flower.
I think Chris is gonna give her her bottle
all the way over there and then we'll walk in there
and we'll close the door and then we can have some feeding
and baby muskards time.
All right, so.
Maya, this is the famous Howie.
Hi, nice to meet you.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, thanks for coming.
Hi, I'm Maya.
Hi, brother.
Nice to meet you.
All right.
Okay, sorry, how is it, how is it, how is it, how is it?
I was wondering how your team was, but I don't see them.
Hey, quickie.
Can you keep your phone? You okay? You always need something in each one.
Chris, do you want me to bring this bucket in?
Oh, you just need to find a reason.
There's something in this bucket.
This is one of the cutest animals I've ever seen in my life.
Alright.
Second.
Are you ready?
Second.
Next evolution, go.
Alright, you can come on in.
Thank you.
There we go.
Cute and cozy.
Thank you, Holly.
Alright, I'll have you guys scoot for her so I'll put this guy back.
Oh my gosh, here she comes, here she is.
Hello. Hi Brooks.
Alright, who's all gonna be feeding her?
Yeah, I'll be right back.
Alright, so there's 28 ounces and she will drink this in like two seconds.
Okay.
And all that.
So we have everybody who wants to feed her, you guys can.
Brooks.
And she loves scratchies, so.
Scratchies?
Yeah.
It's gonna be as soon as you get the bottle, she's gonna last.
She's gonna kind of jump like that and all that, so.
Yeah.
See, I would wait until she's done with the bottle, because sometimes it takes her a second.
So like, her brain tells her that she's full.
Not her, she's full.
She's a lot taller than her.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
She's a good girl.
Next, she gets the bottle.
She's locked in to be in the screen.
Thanks man.
Yeah. How old is she?
Yeah.
Just about almost 100 pounds for the last weight we got was about 39 kilos.
Yeah.
So she's easing up there.
Is it 100 pounds?
Yeah.
Oh, she's dense.
Wow.
Yeah, she's a short and dense girl.
Josh you smashed this. I'm sorry everyone that's done this.
We're gonna feed it to her after she's done with her milk. She's getting air there.
Okay, we see a lot of it.
Wow, great job.
It takes her brain a moment to remember that she can't do it anymore.
She gets so fishy and all that.
We can get her some fire weed.
Yeah, once she remembers that the bottle is empty, she'll calm down.
So yeah, I don't have anything for you, Brooks.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, over here.
A snack.
There we go.
Yep.
Yeah.
You come in here.
Snack.
Oh, you can do it.
Oh, yeah.
She's a good girl.
Yeah, she's a good girl.
If the fire we get too late, you need to put them up.
Yeah, she's like the lawn mower.
So true, they said.
So true.
These are all mows by a lawn mower.
Ha ha ha ha.
What about a muskowl?
He's a muskowl.
And if you guys want to pet her, you're more than welcome to.
She's used to the pets, and she's super super soft.
Eating animals.
I can't move.
She's saying, you have leaves.
you have leaves.
She's coming back.
I did this for a while, so it's good.
Do they like belly rubs?
She loves being touched all over, and that's one of the things, like the
training that we're working, where they're just being touched, being what we call
desensed. So as she gets older, she's used to us touching her, using her
picking up her hooves, getting those, all those pets and those scratches are
all kind of really good for her. So that way when we work. And then, so what you guys are
We call it kiddie. It's one of the softest things on the planet.
She wants all of my icing.
I need to hold on really tight.
Super soft.
Yeah, super soft.
Can you tell the story of why she's here?
And why she's under here?
Yes, so her mom was in our care.
It's still in our care. Her mom's name is Suni and she's back here being bottle-fed because
animals, they don't always have the social understanding of when they have a baby.
Like I have to feed it. I have to take care of it.
Sometimes they just don't know how to do that and historically muskox are one of those species that don't
always know like I have to make sure that this thing gets all the things it needs to grow happy and healthy.
So, in our decision to bottle feed her, we know exactly what she's getting.
We know exactly how much food she's getting.
We can weigh her all the time to make sure she's gaining weight.
We know exactly that she's getting all the minerals that she needs to grow happy and
helping kind of set her up to live here for the rest of her life.
She likes yours.
Solid poop.
That's such good looking poop.
That's so hard.
She's a phenomenal baby.
That's hard to do.
Congratulations.
Yeah, solid poop.
It's hard to do. Congratulations.
You're so cool.
We have to move over there.
Yeah.
So big, Sobby.
Alright, try giving her a belly wrap.
There's a squat.
A squat.
And she was about 20 pounds
she was born, so she's almost quintupled in size since then.
She was, she's doing, we layer every Wednesday and every Saturday, she was getting the Keele again.
So 2.2 pounds per day.
She's around the girl, she is really big.
I couldn't deny the feeder all day.
Yeah, right?
So along with the formula we feed her we give her a different brows fireweed willow cottonwood
We also give her she's also got some grain that will feed her to we do some training with that Cheerios
She really likes some Cheerios, so we'll use them Cheerios and every now and again differs. Yep, exactly
We got this whole bundle for her so
There you go, you got it?
Almost.
Here, if you want another one, we've got so many.
Oh, that's eight, nine.
Can you count all of those?
I don't know if I can, there's a lot of here.
So, chat, we've been fundraising for the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center.
All of my, all of our streams being adapt out here in Alaska.
You guys are pretty simple, but for $50,000 for a bunch of...
Can we ask a little bit of the Conservation Center? That's where we are right now.
And those donations go into helping to things like this.
This is a baby musk ox that is being bottle fed here.
Thank you so much for watching NaGio Part 3.
Thank you so much for allowing us to come out here and do stuff like this.
This is unbelievable.
It's so cool.
And this is where your donations are going.
Thank you.
This is the cutest animal I've ever seen.
I mean, what the heck is that in mind?
Ha?
Okay.
Here.
Huh?
Okay.
Here.
He's so... He's so big.
Bleh!
I like it!
Yo, my face is nice.
It's the worst one.
Oh, yeah.
I got a fan in the house.
I like fatherly ice cream.
Really?
So good.
Huh?
You see, I can turn right around.
Cool.
Yeah.
Do you need to pull it off?
Oh yeah.
Just start with a rectangle and then put.
Because all you need is just like an extra.
Take some of that.
Just stand true.
But that's awesome.
Yeah, we're like if you're making cookies and you're using the butter, that's kind of like some sugar.
They're just so short.
Oh my goodness.
That's exactly what she sounds like.
Really?
Exactly what it sounds like.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh wow nice.
Whoa, whoa.
Oh my gosh.
He's never seen one that small.
That was so cute.
Yeah.
He's so funny.
So good.
I'll beat him.
What?
you want me to see oh she wants to she likes yours it's better than yours it
looks like it I can't get over their ears I really I the way they're pointy
and up.
Wow.
She needs to stay on fire.
She loves the fire.
Don't you just watch the
people out there get to see?
She's very gentle.
She's very slow-killed.
She's so cute.
What is that animal? This is a muscox. It's a baby muscox.
I don't like them.
Wow.
Yeah.
I don't think she does either.
No, no.
No fun.
He wants mine.
He wants no more than mine.
He, he, he, he, he.
What's that?
I don't know if this is going to be wise.
I would say it's probably
somewhere between like
Well
And then after we release, you cry some more, like you guys don't give me enough food and
enough attention.
Well, she's almost eating all the leaves of that.
Yeah.
She's a big eater.
Yeah.
I think I should take a look back there.
What is this cutie?
This is a baby musk ox.
Oh dear.
Cool.
Hi.
We can see her through the fence. She's not out of her garden yet, but we can walk on over there, but this might join us.
You guys can follow, press that way, I'll be watching you to see.
Cool, sure.
So Chad, it wasn't part of the plan for me to come out here for this. It was just going to be Connor, but I'm really really glad I got to see it.
I'm glad that you guys are getting to see this too.
I think it's a special thing to be able to fundraise
and then see where it's going, you know?
And live streaming gives us the ability to do that.
Who's this?
This is our newest animal we got.
She's still in quarantines.
She's a fondly we got.
So we have the barriers between us.
So when we go in for quarantine,
we have to down up and everything
just because she came from the wall.
So we just don't know what she has.
We just want to make sure she's clean before we've
reintroduced her to any of our population and all that.
So we have this, I guess, a double barrier in everything.
When we go in there, I think down all up
and it takes me 20 minutes to get ready to go in.
Right.
Yeah, so she was found over in Fitzwilliam Sound, I believe.
Is this a black tailed deer?
Yes, it's a black tailed.
So she's a couple months old.
Cool.
So she's not on a bottle anymore?
No, she got her.
She decided that she didn't want the bottle.
So instead of bottle feeding her, what we do
We just take the milk dump it right into a bowl and then she just easy. Yep. That's great news
Really happy for you guys
She's kind of got that like Goldilocks zone. So if it's too cold, she won't drink it too warm not enough
So they get that right temperature and she'll drink all of it every single time
So yeah, she's kind of cool that she's like our newest one and she's getting used to you know
Already used to people which will come right up to us and you know, just like lots of love and attention
Look at this little thing.
Who's this thing?
Oh my gosh.
Hello.
Do you have a new friend?
A new dear friend.
day before they hit their first birthday?
Yeah.
How big of a day are you going to do your first real cold talk?
Yeah, probably around this size, maybe a little bit more.
You said she's gaining about two pounds a week right now.
A day.
So maybe by the time it hits October or November, she could...
She was a day?
Yeah, she gained, like I said, we weighed her on Wednesday.
She was 36.3 kilos.
I weighed her on Saturday.
So she could be probably close to double the size by the time like winter release sets in
They're about 20 pounds when they're born and
She even is she's so much bigger now when she was born
I have three-day weekends I come back and I can and I just in the three-day week
It's like yeah, you can tell a huge difference in your size and all that
Darking says, I'm in love with this baby Muskox and she doesn't get everything she wants
for the rest of her life, I'll die.
She gets pretty much everything she wants.
I fear more than what she wants.
Oh my goodness, in that form it's just adorable.
Yummy. Wow. Snack.
What plant is she eating? This is called fireweed.
And I guess flowers are edible for people too. It's a thing.
Find that out later.
Flowers, the petals are edible. People can make syrup out of them.
Cool.
We're actually going to try to make a tea out of it and then so we can so be able to bottle feed her after she's off the bottle
Yeah, we use it for training enrichment. Oh
I'm doing a training session. We can have somebody present a bottle. You know, we can be able to pick up her hooves
Yeah, I did already sweet. So it just gives us more more things to kind of work with these guys
Your wolf is going
We'll get a replacement mic jet.
So cool.
Moose they said.
Ginda.
They got four legs.
Yeah they got four legs they're brown.
Don't get boss on there.
When's the boss that brown?
I think closer to a deer or the only reference I have is
a maple and she was
later than normal.
Gotcha.
Wow.
No horns yet.
Very rectangular legs, snacking.
All right, child, one last shot with the cutest animal alive.
This is Brooks, the baby muskox.
She's a legend.
Adelaide Wildlife Conservation Center.
Thank you guys for fundraising.
Thank you for watching.
We're not done yet with stream,
but we're gonna say goodbye to Brooks.
Goodbye, you're so cute, I love you.
Oh, yeah, on the Polaroid, another Polaroid shot.
You want to take a picture? You want to come in?
Come over here, we'll take a picture.
Ready?
Alright. So soft. So cool. Thank you guys.
Okay.
Thirst for blood.
So Conor was saying you guys didn't hear him. Conor has slept in there multiple times.
I can intern bottle feeding muskox back in like 2014.
You're good. We uh, Christina's mic is dead.
I don't know if you have another one or if you just want to...
I can swap it with his mic.
Oh, thank you.
We're running down.
I don't know.
Alright.
Snack is through the fence.
Cool.
So cool.
What an unbelievable animal.
Yeah, I mean that's like...
That's one of the cutest animals I've ever seen in my life.
Yes.
I for the first time ever got to meet some rhinos this last year like one-on-one
Yeah, and I actually got to meet a 10-day-old rhino, and I officially have
decided that must-gox are hairy rhinos. Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense.
Hi buddy! Hello!
Oh, Rich.
Um, actually, so, like, above my door, there's that dog in the middle picture.
That was my husband, Shepard, who actually passed away this winter.
But she raised all the wolves and helped introduce new wolves to each other,
and worked out their way.
Karate's a just giant, ten-haired, stupid dog.
I don't know if they know what to do.
But they believe we're the year-round care team who's so high up that I live back here.
Sorry.
No.
I'm sorry you made it.
Oh, of course.
Thank you so much for having us.
The weather's working for you guys.
Yeah, it's been awesome.
Oh, we got lucky I heard that the weather was awesome.
It was.
Yeah, and we got some cool wildlife spotting.
and we got a salmon shark, links.
We saw a juvenile wolf eel out there.
That sounds freaking awesome.
So cool.
What else?
Birds, herior hawks, foxes.
Oh nice.
Yeah, yeah, it was sweet.
It was a success for children.
I see.
He loves people so much.
And he is obsessed with children in particular.
He was like, please let me see him.
I could look at him.
Would you mind introducing yourself to the, cause the stream is right here, sorry.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, no.
I'm Howie, I'm the currently servicing executive director for the Wildlife Center, but started
as an intern 16 years ago, worked with Connor there at one point there in those years, and
somehow, and Kayla, and yeah, there's a whole crew of folks that, Lindsey, everybody
So you're still all together?
Yeah, you guys are all still connected on the next sample.
And since 2000, just before COVID, my husband and I
were asked to move out here to be the year-round caretaker.
So that's why he's here, because he's part of my Paw Patrol.
It goes around with me in the evenings just
to keep an eye on everything.
Awesome.
Yeah.
OK, guys, so this is, if you are just now tuning in,
which I know a lot of you have been here for this whole stream,
but we are at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center.
and we've been fundraising for them for the past week.
We are over $50,000.
Amazing.
Crazy.
And it's been cool to tour this facility
so you guys can see the operations and where
your donations are going.
Tons of really cool conservation work, rehabilitation
work, education work.
And they're giving us a really special tour today.
So thank you for having us.
Thanks for coming.
Of course.
It's been great.
Christina, I've been watching you guys
as you've been walking around.
Oh, sweet.
Your streaming is super great.
Thank you.
I need to speak to you guys.
There's a tiny human.
This is a very special tour for Riggs.
In Riggs, she's so in Riggs.
Just want some food for every new children.
Children out of here.
Oh, good.
We've got one last printer for you guys to meet.
You guys have to go meet Taz.
I don't know who Taz is, but I'm down.
She's the star of the show.
I've said that for all of them, but she really, for me, is perfect.
She's the queen.
Okay.
All right, have fun.
Thank you, Zoe.
Taz is for Taslina.
She is a black bear cub that came into our care.
She is from Tachican, Alaska, which
is the southernmost city in Alaska.
She was orphaned on the northern end of that island
in Alaska to perm and fishing game.
Watched her for a couple of days.
Mom did not return.
So she was brought into our care.
We're going to feed her a little bit of her diet.
And so she is also just a couple of months old black bears are typically born in January
and February and March and then they usually come out of the den in June and they're eight
ounces when they're born.
So she's put out a lot of weight since she was born.
So a very interesting way to feed.
I'm going to hand you this.
You're just going to take that and choose it because it's so gentle.
Amazing.
That's exactly how you feel back there.
And Chad if you didn't see this is her inside space that she's choosing to sit
in but she's got a whole outside space as well. Yeah and as she continues to grow
we'll keep expanding and expanding and expanding that outside space.
She's so cute are you kidding me? Yeah it's kind of ridiculous. Grape.
Yay, grape.
That berry, we give her all the good stuff.
That looks strawberry for you.
They're so gentle.
So gentle, yeah.
Yeah.
I've worked around like a lot of large carnivores, big cats and stuff,
but bears, they're just, I mean, they will literally eat one piece of food at a time.
You guys met our the big Grizzlies that we have our frumbers and they'll like each piece of kibble
It's it's great hilarious, but it's also very time-consuming when you try to feed them. Yeah, they're all that
Blueberry
I want to swap out with Max here because I think he would die
Yeah
Do you want to feed her a couple pieces?
Yeah, go for it.
Oh no.
He's carrying small children.
Max is carrying small children.
I'll spare her.
Oh, good job, Trot.
Go Blueberry.
Wow, she's so cute! She's got eyelashes.
She's a beautiful girl.
Down here if you guys want to come in.
You can go.
You're not going. She's like,
what do you mean I don't get the rest of my girls?
I'm not.
Because this is where I'm going to show everybody
the favorite thing. Come on.
I know.
Can we do work?
Wow!
That's what you can do.
Show you this. You have to stand up. You can see that big belly.
Wow!
There's that belly.
It's so tall there.
Yep.
There you can just reach in there.
Here we go.
Oh.
What do you smell?
They're all tall.
Hello.
So her diet is fruits, veggies, kibble.
Protein, yeah.
Raw?
Yeah, about blackberries diets, usually about 80% is based around fruits and vegetables,
about 20% is based around proteins or meat.
And even now, it's kind of out in the wild.
These guys eat a lot of woolly bugs and bark and plant matter, so we kind of mimic the
same thing.
Fruits and vegetables, I mean, she'll always work for, or loves eating strawberries
berries, so we always, this is always the best part for her day.
And then, are you guys doing any training with her yet?
Yeah, so we've started doing some just basic behaviors.
So we can target train her, we have a target pole.
She had a crate underneath there, but being a bear, she destroys everything.
Right.
So she ruined her crate, so we have to get her a new one.
With a teacher, she can like raise one paw.
We're working on just stationing, so she's got that little station out there.
So when we have to go in and feed her,
she goes to her window leg and she'll stay in there.
So we're just kind of working basic behaviors right now.
And then eventually we'll start working
a little bit more complicated things.
Like she knows how to go on a scale and weigh herself.
So anything we can do to involve it,
just make her health care and make the care of her
a lot easier and better here.
So you just see, like I said,
even if you want to, you can grab like something
you can have her just hold it above her head again
and she'll stand up together.
So just even things like that,
because we can get a look at her claws,
She doesn't know how to do belly.
You just kind of get an overall look.
Yep.
Oh, yeah.
So, yeah, just doing those basic things like that, you know, helps us just get a good overlook
of her own health care.
She doesn't realize that she's participating in her own health care.
She just gets to do those things.
We think it's really cute, but it gives us a good look at, you know, things that we
would not have looked at all the time.
Yeah.
And then did you say, did you bottle her when she came in?
Nope.
No.
Okay.
I think we gave her a little bit of formula.
We mixed it in with her dog kibble.
But we never did any bottle feeding with her.
So as soon as we got her, she's always
kind of on some sort of like a solid food.
So she's so cute.
I'm going to explode.
And then are you guys all protected contact with her?
We are.
We're still going in with her.
Just to be able to serve her clean.
She still doesn't work in some shift training.
Her outdoor cage is paired up to one
of our other- I can eat black bears or working on introductions with them- so
they get- used to each other the goal is the hope that- bears are solitary
animals- but the goal be if these two show interest in so that they can- be
happy together well let him- kind of live in that exact not exhibit together-
sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't so we're just kind of you know
we let them decide what they want to do if she doesn't want to go meet
co-blocking. You know be with him and that's fine. We have other places we
can always house her. It's crazy she doesn't tear those up or does she.
She didn't mean you can see that she did rip the head up. She actually did have a giant raccoon that how he bought her
And she ripped the paw open and started giving the stuffing so she lost the raccoon privileges
Do you want another?
Over it
Making room. Making some room. Yep.
Blueberry.
That smells nice.
How much does she eat in a day, they asked.
We just upped her diet. She's getting around 2,100 grams, I think, a day.
So roughly about, we try to aim for about 8 to 10 percent of her body weight.
So we weigh her every couple weeks and then we adjust her diet to that so we can keep her in a range.
Yeah, a couple more.
Chot lost two pieces, Chot blueberry, success.
Thank you so much.
You're welcome.
How cool.
Mm-hmm.
I lost my shot.
Hello.
Wiccan, I see you again.
Yeah she just choose to hang out.
Inside.
Cool.
Wow.
She's so gorgeous.
She's a really special bear.
So cool.
Do bears actually eat honey IRL?
I think they would.
Yeah they definitely do.
We will sometimes use it especially for like enrichment
or if we're asking them to do something extra special
we'll give them honey.
in the wild if they find honey they're gonna go ham yeah gonna eat it really
just about anything bears are kind of the only animal I'd say that for they just
about everything yeah I don't I don't think you guys heard but she was making
some noise when we were in there yeah she was like you love you want to see
the other baby cool thank you guys so much thank you guys for coming and for
supporting us. It's like, you know, the least we could do.
Of course. I'm so glad you guys got to see it. Chat, thank you so much for all of your donations.
Are we rapping? Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much for all of your donations. Thank you for watching
all of the Not Geostreams of the Daft. Over $50,000 is unbelievable. I'm so glad you guys got
to see this facility. I'm so glad I got to see the facility because I wasn't going to be here
originally either. It was just going to be Connor. So very, very special place. I'm
I'm stoked to have seen it, and I'm really glad that you guys got to see all of this.
And we got some really special stuff today.
So thank you for, thank you for doing that.
Thank you guys for coming.
We can't say enough good things about what you guys and your gifts to us.
So thanks for showing us off and meeting the babies.
And we appreciate you guys so, so much.
Of course.
Sweet.
All right.
All right, that's going to be it guys.
I will see you either tomorrow or Tuesday.
And we got, we got a recap to do.
Thank you for watching.
Conor, anything else?
Thank you guys so much, stay hard.
Bye guys, I'll see you in a bit, good bye, good bye, good bye, good bye.
Also say bye to Max, go check him out, trailbound sketches.
He's hand-drying the children somewhere.
Sweet.