Random Updates

We finally have a fertile egg - and its a Whooping Crane egg! Tomorrow I am scheduled to help with AI in the morning, so that should be fun. A couple of days ago we had a badger hole inside crane city, so we filled it in. There have been several holes since, so we are trying to get it away from the birds. I never thought I'd be helping solve a badger problem. I just hope I get to see one. There was a huge rainbow this morning on my way to work - I took a couple pics, I'll post 'em in the next couple of days. Tomorrow right after work I am going to Madison with another intern. We are going to meet up with one of my roommates and go to a powwow. It should be a neat experience.

Sorry I haven't posted in a while! I've been working long days and just haven't gotten around to updating. We have had pretty many eggs in the past few days - most recently, 4 yesterday and 2 today. We got two whooper eggs, unfortunately both are infertile. I took some pics of some of the birds at the pod (display birds) last week and I posted them in the ICF birds album on Flickr. I took a few more today and I will get those up sometime tonight or tomorrow. I really don't have a lot to talk about . . .
I've been getting questions about why so many eggs are infertile, so I guess I should explain. Female birds can lay eggs without copulating or having a mate. Some of the eggs so far have been by single females, so they are obviously not fertilized. Some pairs do not have good odds of being naturally fertile, and other times pairs simply don't copulate at the right time to fertilize the eggs. A lot of it comes down to timing, and they seem to have a hard time getting it right.

Yesterday I went to Eagle Optics in Middleton, WI to buy some binoculars. Since I was close to Madison, I stopped by the Henry Vilas Zoo, which is a large free zoo. It was colder than I expected, so I didn't stay long, but I will definitely go back. They had a lot of animals, and it is an AZA accredited zoo. I was planning on taking pictures, but my camera batteries died soon after I got there and I didn't have any extra with me. I'll post the couple pics that I took.
Today I went birding (with my new binoculars) at a place called Leopold Reserve. It is fairly close to the International Crane foundation, and there is a lot of land in the reserve. I took a few pics, which I will post. I saw a lot of birds, including a Pileated Woodpecker. The land was pretty and appeared to provide a nice habitat for a lot of birds. It was mostly all wooded area, but fairly often there were small pools of water where I found a lot of birds foraging.

Today at work one of the staff members took the interns out to practice artificial insemination (AI). We practiced on about 5 Sandhill cranes which was really neat. We did both males and females and took turns doing each thing. It takes two people, one to hold/stimulate the crane and another to actually give or receive the sample. Afterwards we took two sperm samples back to the lab so we could practice determining sperm density and motility.
We candled the Wattled crane egg today, and we are pretty sure it is infertile. I took a picture of the egg, so I will put that up on flickr soon.
Hope everyone has a good Easter!

pics

I have updated some pictures on flickr. There are more added to the Oschner Park & Zoo album and I posted a couple pics of Casper.

Update

I keep forgetting to update this, so here goes.
We got a few eggs last week, and I was able to go in and pick a couple up so that we could mark and measure them. It was a great experience. They candled three of the eggs yesterday, and unfortunately none of them were fertile. There is still at least one more that will be candled in the next few days I believe. The cranes whose eggs were infertile will hopefully lay more clutches so we can get some fertile eggs - I want some chicks!
Saturday I drove to Western Illinois University to attend an enrichment workshop. I went for a girl I work with because she was unable to attend. It was interesting and I learned some information on enrichment that I believe will be helpful in future jobs. It was fun taking the company vehicle and going on a mini "business trip."
Today I had Skyline for lunch thanks to my mom and the post office!
Hope you all are doing well.