Signs of spring at the museum:
Turtles hatching and moving towards the wetland
Baby slider, nickel for scale
But officially, spring starts when you see Sherry zipping around the bear yard aerating and planting grass seed.
Sherry on the mule in the bear exhibit
Afterward, the bears had fun playing in the cut grass.
Yona eats some grass while Mimi and Gus roll in fresh cut grass
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Sherry, what do you do with the bear poop? Seriously – I’ve heard of the benefits of rabbit, sheep, horse manure, but can you put bear poop in your garden? Or would that just attract other bears?
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Resident web geek Beck, here, welcoming you to our new home. Let me show you around.
To your left, you’ll see some gray icons. They relate to the ones in the navigation bar above, which are based on the new way we’re categorizing posts on the blog. If you hover over the icon for a couple seconds, you’ll see a tooltip that tells you what category the icon represents. If you click on it, you’ll see other posts in that category.
Under the icons, there’s a picture of the author and his or her name. If you click on the author’s name, you’ll see all the posts from that author.
Under the date and bio, you’ll see a list of tags. If you click on a tag, you’ll see all the posts that share that tag. Tags are a convenient way to explore the blog when you’re wanting to read more about something that our icon categories don’t represent.
To your right, there’s a comment box and perhaps (by the time you read this) comments. You don’t have to login to comment (though you can if you’d like) and if you see comments in orange, it means that a keeper/blogger has responded. Your comments will appear in gray.
Don’t forget about the search box in the top right of the page. That’ll help you find posts like Summer breeze, makes me feel fine… a post that may prove helpful if you’re wondering about the origins of our hilarity icon.
Please excuse our mess, we’ll likely be cleaning up post categories and rogue video embed code for the next little while. If you spot something awry, help us out by leaving a comment on the offending page.
We hope you feel at home here in no time and welcome your feedback and ideas. As my very favorite web geek says, “See you in cyberspace.”
p/s. If you subscribe to our blog with RSS and your reader didn’t pick up this post, please resubscribe using this RSS feed.
Looks great! Like the new layout, colors, and of course, the postings!!
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As you well know by now, Nimbus the super adorable rabbit has been living in the building instead of the farmyard where she’s usually found. She’s still doing ok, she has good days and bad days, but she’s eating well and gets extra love and attention since she hangs out where we are for a lot of the day.
Her being in the building has also given her the chance to make some new friends with some of our animals who are used for education. She spends most of her days these days with Little, our silky chicken (we just call her Chicken). Here they share breakfast:
Nimbus also got to meet Bugsy, our male rabbit, for the first time. She almost immediately started grooming him. Here’s a video (uh, this is an edited version). **WARNING** You have never seen anything this cute:
And then she got some supervised play time with our chinchillas Salt and Pepper. I love the way she gets so animated when they first come out. She really seems to be interested in the other creatures. It was fun to watch Nimbus’s ears as Salt and Pepper split up to explore different parts of the room–she kept one ear following each. **WARNING** This is also really cute:
Maybe Bugsy and Nimbus can play catch together! I will definitely keep you updated on that…
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March is when we start thinking about the grass in the bear yard again. We always seed, aerate and fertilize the bear yard in March- we mow too. We have everything we need on hand to proceed: LOTS of seed (we over seed), a little natural fertilizer (we don’t use/need much as the bear yard gets lots of natural fertilizer), our aerator, Kent (he’s the tractor driver), me, and the tractor. As you can see, the tractor is out of commission right now.
We’ll make arrangements to use other equipment of it’s not back together in time.
It usually only takes an hour once we are in the yard, so if you come by and see us mowing or seeding, you can watch, or return at another time to see the bears. You won’t be able to see the bears when we tend to the yard as they are locked in the house for everyone’s safety.
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I just wanted to share some photos of our opossums making good use of their enrichment. This is Sonny and Cher, our Carolina Wildlife opossums that live together on exhibit. As you can see, they like to sleep together, whether it be in an old tree trunk, a hammock, or a shoe box. You may only be able to see one face peaking out of the shoe box, but both of them were in there. It was kind of funny to watch them both climb out of it… similar to watching clowns pile out of a car! You can learn more about Sonny and Cher here in a Creature Feature post.
Here they are in the hollowed-out tree trunk:
And here in a shoe box:
SO CUTE!
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A question to ponder: Why would the temperature of the ocean water off the coast of South America cause a woman in Chicago to re-consider her purchase of soybeans?
For this month’s episode of Big Word of the Month, I want to discuss my favorite oceanic/atmoshpheric phenomenon (you have one too, right!) . Climate scientists use the term El Niño , Southern Oscillation to describe the complex relationship between the patterns of atmospheric pressure over the Pacific Ocean and the ocean circulation patterns off the western coast of South America. Because that phrase is such a mouthful, people use the abbreviation ENSO to save time.
The short and simple version of ENSO is that in most years weather patterns over the Pacific lead the coastal waters of South America to relatively cool. This common situation is referred to as a La Niña condition. Every few years though, the Southern Oscillation shifts back towards the western Pacific and the coastal water of South America warm slightly. If the warming exceeds about 1 degree Farhenheit, the event is described as a El Niño event.
This small change has very large global impacts. The map below shows you how moisture and temperature patterns change around the globe during an El Niño period.
Fig. 1 Winter Impacts from El Niño conditions(image from Wikicommons)
As you can see, an El Niño event leads to wetter and cooler winter in the Southeastern United States and warmer conditions in the Northwest US and Canada. So based on the extra snow here at the Museum and the poor ski conditions at the Olympics in Vancouver, you might not be surprised to learn that this year is a strong El Niño year. Ocean temperatures off South America have been above normal since last fall and are expected to stay that way through early spring.
Back to our question: Why would a woman in Chicago, interested in buying soybeans, be influenced by the temperature of the sea water off the coast of South America? Put your guess in the comments section below. I’ll post the answer in a few days if no one gets it right.
Read more about ENSO at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center
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Yup, a call for you $$$. I won’t push too hard, just a little… If you love the Museum and our bears, maybe you’d like to contribute to the cause.
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What a cute little turtle!!