yep! i brought my camera with me

Ask anyone in my family and they will tell you im a big picture taker! i love capturing moments in my life :) i love going back and looking at the pictures and remember the fun times i had!

Well i have taken a TON of pictures and videos... here are a few :) enjoy:

This is Ike. Ike is a mantjac deer and makes the most unexpected squeaking noise! He is also a big licker :) He is one of the few animals that we let people pet on when they go on a tour. He love saying hello by giving your hand a lick!:

These are pictures and a video of the Coatimundis or the Coatis. They are so cute and fun to be around... but they get into everything!

This is Pigeon or Bird... he doesn't have an official name. Anyway i get the privilege of cleaning his pen daily, and he doesn't like it! but i must say that i am getting really good at catch birds :) i gave him a little ball with a bell inside it to play with! I'd say he enjoys it:

This is my entourage! everywhere i go... they follow :) these guys are teaching me how to run fast and climb fences because when you have food watch out! because you are VERY out numbered!

These are pictures of the camels... there are 5. Two really big ones (Sam and Chuck) and three smaller/younger ones (Cookie, Gabby, and Choco). There is also a video showing how big Sam and Chuck are:

These are Kune Kune pigs! Athena had a litter of 7! The piglets are so cute! If you scratch their belly in the right spot they fall over! it is so funny :) there is a video of it under the pictures:

These are Lesser Ant-Eaters or Tamanduas. We call them Tams for short! These guys are the cutest :) and they are the most chill animals! You carry them by the tails and they are fine with it. And because they make a mess eating we give them a bath, and they are chill with that too! They are cute but they sure do stink! We have 5 tams; 4 adults and 1 baby boy. The one i am holding in the pic is the baby tam:

We have LOTS of Kangaroos! Red Kangaroos and Eastern Grey Kangaroos we have two Albino Kangaroos and Wallaroos:

This is a video of Trooper. He is a male Grey Kangaroo. He shares a pen with Athena, the Kune Kune pig, and her piglets. In this video he is "barking" at her... he likes to bark at us too, especially when we are raking his pen:

Here is Alfred and I :)

These are the sloths. We have six of them and they are sure weird looking animals... but don't let the face and slow movement fool you, they can move their head awful fast! They have super shard nails and teeth. They can sure mess you up in a hurry if your not careful.There is a LOT more where these come from, I'll post more but i'm kinda sick of uploading things... so later :)

What's in your purse?

You can tell a lot about a women by what kind of purse she carries and what's inside it...

When we have open zoo days (that's what we call it when we allow people to come and see the animals. It happens about two days a month) we take this particular roo out so that people can pet on her and get up close to a Red Kangaroo. Well she was getting too big to carry... so we came up with a brilliant idea to carry her in a beach bag :) it worked perfectly and she rather enjoyed the ride!

Late night decorating

Friday I worked from 8:30 AM to 9 PM. Today I worked from 7:20 AM to 6:45 PM... talk about LONG days!
Saturday was open zoo day, so the public was allowed to come in and we would give them tours, and we were having a photographer come and take pictures so we can make a pamphlet and advertise more!
Well Friday was crazy busy trying to clean everything and make it look nice for the people coming in, but it also consisted of decorating :) TGR Exotics does birthday parties! So all last night we spent cleaning the party room (which previously housed the lemurs because it was too cold outside for them) and decorating! I think it turned out pretty cute:

You can see the Ring-Tailed Lemurs in the corner.. they aren't suppose to be in there, but it was still to cold for them to go outside.


The bows on the back of the chairs was my touch!

Today was good :) lost of people came, we got some good pictures, and we got birthday cake from it too! It made the long day go by pretty fast!

Muddy then Cold

It is colder here than it is in UTAH! well that is if you factor in the humidity :) It was SOO cold the other day! I felt right at home. here are some pictures i snapped:

A pipe must have burst or something... but it freezes at night and this tree was COVERED in icicles :) so pretty

Here is some ice that i found on the ground but it is representing all of the poor animal's water bowls. When we got out in the morning all of their water is frozen solid! We have to run hot water in it to get it out!

it rains in the day so everything is muddy and nasty and then freezes at night. This is a picture of a human foot print (left) and a camel's foot print (right) with ice in them.

smells like...

As Kim would say "Smells like death". We found this kangaroo today:Look close at her jaw. It is swollen and puffy... and STINKS! It's infected and full with puss. We have an appointment with the vet... it looks like this girl will be living in the barn for the next month while we give he meds and she heals!

Now look closely at this roo:There's a joey in there and it's SOOO cute!

Sleepover at the zoo

On Thursday February 3 kids got sent home from school early, businesses closed, and road were getting shut down. There was a storm coming and possibly the chance of snow. Everyone was excited :)
Rain or shine, snow or hail, weekends or holidays animals need to be taken care of! So rather than driving around in the storm tomorrow morning i stayed the night there :) and had a grand old time!
I played with a hairless cat named pooh, cuddled with baby baboon (which was thee cutest thing) and was a jungle-gym for a 6 month old spider monkey all before dinner. We ate dinner and then headed out to the spare bedroom. We decided to watch a movie and finish some valentines day decorations we had started earlier. Well the movie that was chosen was "Zombieland" which was rated R. Now i had decided a long time ago that i wasn't going to watch R rated movies. I had stuck to that decision this far and wasn't going to break it now. It was so hard to say that i would rather not watch that movie, but i did and was so glad that i spoke up! Instead we watched "Karate Kid" but ten minutes it stopped working. O well, we just decided to stick to the decorations and talk instead. It was so much fun to get to know Gwen and what makes her the way she is! We finally finished decorating and decided to go to bed around 1 (because we did have to get up early the next morning).
This morning we woke up to find everything covered in ice! Now that was something new to me! no snow... but ice everwhere! it was seriously everywhere! you could literally go ice skating on the grass :) and i did! I had a grand time! It was also funny to see all the animals on it walking or should i say sliding around :) Sindu the Bengal Tiger was loving it! We put sand down for the animals to have some traction and continued on as if it was a normal day, which it was; it was just really cold! Now i know that sounds stupid, saying Texas is cold, but i was freezing outside! It is a different cold than what i am use to, different from the dry Utah winter. It is a humid cold here! It stings your face and goes right through your coat!
Well that was today... cold icy and fun :)

"cold" and crazy

Boy it is already wednesday and im sore and tired! It has been crazy at TGR for the past couple of days!
Monday I arrived at work with the news that we are moving all the animals indoors because it is going to get too cold outside for them. When i heard that my heart sunk a little. First of all there really isn't that much room inside. We have two garages and a kitchen for keeping animals inside. For the past little bit the 6 sloths and 5 tams/lesser ant-eaters have been inside because it has been too cold for them, and that has not been fun! We have to keep it hot in there so they don't freeze and they smell so bad. So when i heard that we are bringing in more animals i really wasn't excited... but i knew we had to do it. So monday was the day that i had my patience tried. We had to get the lemurs, porcupines, capybaras, sloths and tams into crates and take them inside. Seriously the whole day was spent waiting for animals to go into their crates. We don't want to loose the trust of the animals or teach them to hate and be afraid of crates, because that would make our job a lot more difficult, so we put food inside and let the animals take their sweet time going in. and boy did they take their time :) well we eventually got everyone inside and situated to their new cages for the next 10 days... yep that's right 10 days with everyone inside...
Tuesday, day one of ten
It was raining today and windy... holy cow i have never seen it blow so much or so hard! definitely different from logan weather! Once arriving at TGR i immediately started sweating, it was so hot inside! i was dying of heat so i volunteered to go and do the outside things. The camels, lamas, kune kune pigs, kangaroos, and bear cats are all tough enough to withstand the cold so i went out to clean their cages and feed them and such. On my way out to the lamas i saw two horses in sam chuck (the HUGE camels) and male lama's pen. Well we don't have horses. The neighbor's horses had broken a fence and gotten in, not a good thing! i ran back and got Kim and Noel to come out and help. It took us a good hour and a half to get the crazy mad horses into a separate pen, fix the fence and try not to get trampled by the camels. Boy what an adrenaline rush that was! and what a way to start the morning! I'm glad to say that no animals or people got hurt! Well that threw off the whole day, all of the animals were going crazy from that and that made tasks a lot more difficult to do. But the day finished.I was tired and sore, from lifting and rearranging animals, by the end of the day but felt good about how much we accomplished!
Today i don't work and am very thankful for the opportunity to rest up before going back to the mad house! but i just got to keep thinking to myself 8 more days until the animals go out and things go back to normal :)