Saturday, October 20, 2012

Rainy season is here!

Remember the three little toucans?  Well they are growing up and are now outside in a nice large space and they are enjoying hopping and moving about.  Rainy season is here and the other night they did sleep inside, it was just so miserable out I was worried about them!
Coco our squirrel has had some ups and downs....we released her and she went up into the tree and built this wonderful nest to sleep in.  This was amazing, it was completely instinctual as she has been in captivity since she was very young.  She was out for several days on her own coming back to visit daily for food and then one day she came back with a broken leg...Not sure how that happened, so we locked her up to limit the movement so that it would heal.  Three weeks later we re-released her.  She has been out for a month now, but with each visit we were noticing her severe lack of weight.  She was not finding food in the wild.  After being gone for three days in a row, she came back horrible weak and thin, so we once again put her back in her cage.  I have noticed that she continues to have issues with her teeth and this is probably the reason she was losing weight, so we are waiting for Janet the vet to come visit.
Another new addition, Nati is a young fiery billed aracari who came into our program with a severely injured wing from being hit by a bus...she is recovering.
Ty is a little over one year  now and enjoying time outside!  He is sharing space with Georgie and soon will have a new enclosure for he and Twili to share.
This Mot Mot came into our rescue program from a neighbors house with this horribly broken wing.  Janet was successful at amputating it and now he is a permanent resident in our new wonderful small bird flight.
In the last blog I talked about all the little birds in traps that we receive, well I had sixteen small cages in my office and had to look at these poor birds unable to even move around in their small traps.
So, we decided to build this flight, it  cost $900 that we paid for, so if anyone can help us with this expense it would be greatly appreciated!!  It is a worthy cause one you will feel good about, check this out...From this:
To This!!
I spent a week in Fort Worth and Dallas visiting friends and giving some lectures about The Toucan Rescue Ranch!  This is from a talk that I gave at Texas Wesleyan University.  The students from there come to Costa Rica to learn Spanish and have volunteered with us.
 I also toured the Fort Worth zoo, Oakridge school, who has adopted one of our owls, and learned about their programs,
and visited friends at the Dallas World Aquarium.
 Richard and Victoria Henderson hosted me, drove me all over to my talks, shopping etc.
Did I say shopping?  they were my taxi service and fed me gourmet meals!
 
 Thank You!!
They have generously given a donation for Ty and Twili's enclosure.
 
I was not used to sleeping so much! So I would get up early and every morning there were deer in their back yard! Plus we attended the same fund raiser dinner for the BRIT Botanical Research Institute of Texas that we attended with them last year, it was wonderful and my good friend Terrie flew in from Reno to attend the event with us. (some of these folks are visiting us in January!)
This was so much fun!  I was greeted at the Oakridge School with this yummy toucan cake!!  Thank you!!
Oakridge has sent us great care packages of items for our clinic and first aid emergency, they have adopted one of our owls and are planning a student trip to Costa Rica next spring!  I have skyped to the classroom, so it was great to finally meet everyone in person!  Their school mascot is the owl and they have beautiful owl art everywhere!  I loved it!
I could sit in front of the flamingo pond at Dallas World Aquarium all day...it was great to see so many different animals.
My good friend Vet Cindy, took me to see this incredible Big Cat Sanctuary....http://www.insyncexotics.org  I met Vicky, pictured here, one very brave lady who was receiving kisses from this huge lion!  Their enclosures are incredible, with swimming pools for the tigers, and they do amazing work, check out their website. 
Our new flight has it's residents!  All the toucans seem to like the new enclosure, and although we don't like the walls that much, they seem to like them and are much calmer.  Hopefully in the spring we will have babies for our release program.
Twili is One Year Old!
Happy Birthday dear little one, soon she will be out in her new enclosure with Ty.
Then we just need to find a sponsor for Anderson Sloths Enclosure Next in line!!  If you would like information on this enclosure please write to me at leslieparrot@yahoo.com for details.
 
Abi and Kerry two film graduates from Boston where here at The Toucan Rescue Ranch living with us for a month while they filmed a short documentary!  You can see a sample of what is to come here on youtube, Promo for the Toucan Rescue Ranch
 
They lived through some very tough times here....to be featured in the documentary, good and bad, sad and happy, that's reality.