No place like home!

This is what a groundhog igloo looks like! 

Top On!

Top Off!

They love to construct a den of hay to sleep in with one very small hardly recognizable opening. It’s amazing how it molds to the dog house!  (one more pic coming)

Can you identify?

Guess whose feather and pellet these are?

Sunbathing on cold days

It’s sunny and cool! Look who likes the sun! 

What a typical cat!

A pellet per meal!

Did you know that all raptors spit up a pellet after they eat? 

If you find a pellet that has only fur in it, then a hawk spit it up. If you find a pellet that has bones and fur in it, then an owl spit it up. 

This is a picture of a barn owl pellet – they are always black and scientists are unsure why. We do an owl pellet dissection class with school children. It’s always fun to see what bones you find and sometimes build a skeleton! Below are our two Barn Owls!

Dear Season=Meaty Treats

Guess who got  this for dinner? 

It’s deer season and our animals love deer meat!

Only three different wolf species!

So many folks don’t know that there are only three wolf species in the US. Check out these pictures to see some of the visual differences.

They are the Canis lupus (the gray wolf):

Canis lupus lycaon (the eastern wolf):

Canis rufus (the red wolf):

If someone speaks of a timber wolf or arctic wolf, these are gray wolves, just a subspecies.

Powerful Noses!

Did you know that wolves have a Jacobson organ in their nose (a patch of sensory cells within the main nasal chamber that detects heavy moisture-borne odor particles. Airborne odors, in contrast, are detected by the olfactory sensory cells located in the main nasal chambers)  and smell 100 times better than humans do!

Humans have approximately 5-6 million smell receptors in their nose while domestic dogs have 100-200 million. Wolves would have even more than that!

Photo by Nancy McCurdy