The first picture is of a young opossum.  He and his siblings were in one of our outdoor enclosures, but he didn’t seem to be doing too well, so he’s back inside for a bit.

The next set is a group of baby (week old) snapping turtles – note the remnants of the yolk sack.  This is sort of an interesting story.  The old non-profit had a snapper that died.  However, we knew that the turtle had eggs.  So we sent the body over to the vet school’s turtle team where they extracted and incubated her eggs until they hatched in August.  These are the her babies.

The other mammal in the set is the baby (3-5 week old) flying squirrel.  Some people called up K when their cat found the squirrel out of the nest.  The little guy is doing well, in spite of the great Esbilac debacle.

The last set of pictures were taken last night.  K has a friend who is also into turtles (let’s call her J).  Between K & J, they probably have more turtle husbandry experience than any other two people in the area.  J is heading out of town and wanted K turtle-sit for some of her more critical patients.  When she came over Tuesday night, she also brought over an incubator with two turtle eggs.  There had been 3 eggs, but one had just hatched (second picture in the group), so who knew when the others would hatch.  Apparently yesterday.  They were still working their way out of their shells when I got home, so there you have it – baby turtles emerging from their shells.

Too cute.

I opened the envelop, and sure enough, it was a two page letter saying that the Triangle Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic is now an official non-profit and it included a lovely pamphlet with information on our responsibilities as such.

Also nice – our status is retroactive to the end of *last* year.  So all of the donations that we’ve received are officially tax deductible.  As are any future donations if anyone wants to donate

Go TWRC!

I got back from Des Moines last month and the next day had a board meeting for the non-profit I work with.  As treasurer, I went to review the financial situation based on the projections we finally received.  Sure enough, the detailed projections were in line with the back-of-a-napkin ones that I had presented earlier, i.e., dire.  The only real solution was to close a significant portion of our operations, which we did.  Unfortunately, that was also the part of operations that K cares most about.

So for the past three weeks, I’ve been working with some other folks, including another board member who resigned after closing operations, to form a new non-profit.  It’s been a little hush-hush, but we did go public today.  We’ve sent out a press release, have a web site, are doing the twitter thing, and even have a facebook page.  Yes, the last two make me feel dirty, but what the hell.

My part’s been largely working the administrative angles with K.  I’m the Board Secretary, so I’ve filed the incorporation paperwork and will be sending off the IRS Form 1023 this weekend in order to get our official tax-exempt status.  We got word yesterday that we were incorporated on July 7th!  (BTW, it’s very cool that information goes online at the NC Secretary of State faster than it goes out in snail mail.)

My colleagues are working with their friends on the branding, etc.  Hopefully we’ll be announcing a coming out party soon.

So, you see, I wasn’t really hangin’ with Galt – I’ve just been working on things I couldn’t be public about until now

On Sunday, K release some baby water turtles that she had been over-wintering.  Fortunately, we’re all of a mile from a good place at which to release turtles, Jordan Lake, so we didn’t have to drive too far.

The big one in the image set is a male (note the long nails for better, um, gripping) slider and the other three are painted turtles (you can see the orange on the underside of the shells in the images in the gallery).

Links take you to the full set.  Oh, and for those wanting to take pictures of fish or reptiles in water, circular polarizers rock.   I do wish I had a better depth of field on some of the images, but it was a cloudy day, I needed the speed and I don’t like using an ISO greater than 800.

A couple of months ago, K got a call about a squirrel.  When the folks brought it over, it turned out to be rather small, but pretty far along in its development.  Well, that’s because it was a flying squirrel.  They tend to be a lot smaller, a lot sweeter and just darn cute.  Because they live in colonies, K found someone with another flying squirrel and has been raising them together.  They just recently went outside, so hopefully they’ll be releasable before winter.  Here are some of the pictures from when they were still inside.

A few more pictures at the gallery site.

• the first 6 pictures were taken in August 2007 when she was about 16 grams
• the second 9 were taken in January 2008 when she was 25g and we were trying to tempt her into eating by giving her meal worms
• the next 6 were taken yesterday before the release – 125g and big enough to defend herself
• the last 3 were taken at the release in Jordan Lake

Good luck little turtle

Since the new version of WordPress has a gallery feature, I thought I would take some pictures at the most recent feeding and see how the gallery worked.

Here she was back in August:

A month later, in September:

And then after she had been outside and right before release in December:

The last two were from the night we started leaving the outdoor cage open so that she could leave when she wanted to.  It took her a bit before she left.  Hopefully she’s doing well.

Three or four weeks ago, K received a call about a baby possum. It seemed that the mother had died and the finders could only locate this one baby. They brought it to the house and K’s been raising it ever since. Apparently, she’s doing a good job. She (the possum, not K) started off at 23g and is now around 80g. The picture above is her clinging to K while sleeping. Note, this is not good rehab practice, but an individual baby possum is a lonely animal.    Fortunately, the possum should “re-wild” as it grows up.

In her more active times, she’s crawling around all over the place, including the top of her aquarium:

The whole family.  Note the little sores on the small one?  That’s where their whiskers are coming in.

Here’s the biggest one by himself.  He needs a bit more enrichment, so he gets to hang out with us on occassion.

I didn’t quite capture the possum tongue, but he was licking me.  Very cute

I’ll take some more pictures tomorrow, including a few of their new-ish, big brother. All of these guys are going back to their regular care taker Monday. They’ve been cute to have around, but I don’t think K is looking for more.

Quick highlights of things that are going on:

• I received an odd email two weeks ago. It was from a professor that I knew, but never worked closely with, in the ECE department. He has a research company that is gearing up for a project that is security related. He wanted to know if I knew of anyone that might be interested in either a full-time or a consulting position. There are two ways that kind of thing can go. He might be asking an honest question or he might be looking to see if I’m interested. As usual for me, it’s easier to play the straight man. I listed a few folks I knew that might be interested in positions, but included myself as one interested in consulting and maybe more. I spoke to the professor last week. The work sounds interesting. They have lots of money, so I agreed to come by in a couple of weeks to see the place, give a talk, meet some people. Or, as I put it to K, we agreed to go on a first date. Last night, K asked what happens after the first date? I told her that depending on how that goes, we might engage in heavy petting. At which point K decided that she had enough of my metaphors.
• I think I mentioned that we were pulling wall paper off of the kitchen/breakfast room wall. The wall paper and the backing are now all off and we’ve picked a paint color. I just need to finish cleaning the paste residue off and do a skim coat of sheetrock mud and we’ll go ahead and get it painted. I’m still not certain about the color, but what the heck – paint is cheap.
• K used some birthday money and bought a couple of day/night mini-cameras designed to go in bird houses. The plan is to run them out to the cages out back. Unfortunately, the cameras only came with 100′ of cable. When we measured off the length last weekend, we realized we needed 300′ of cable each. I volunteered to buy some generic cable and splice it in, but K is risk averse and decided to just buy the extension cables. This weekend, I’ll try to build some small boxes to house the cameras and keep them out of the rain (and away from squirrel teeth).
• The Leadership Program I mentioned earlier did come to campus.  I was planning on reviewing the 5 minute talk I was going to give on Wednesday night since we were asked to speak on Thursday.  So, I’m sitting in my office working on the laptop when someone on my staff comes in with someone attending the program.  They were wondering where we all were?  It turns out that they (or maybe me) had the date wrong and they were hoping we could come speak to them right away.  Fortunately, I had thought a bit about what I wanted to say – I just hadn’t polished it up.  I went in and winged it from there.  Overall, I think it went pretty well.  I just wish I had the extra prep time.
• I’m moving all of my domains off of a desktop computer and on to an ISP. Hey, $8/month, unlimited bandwidth, multiple databases, etc. is definitely worth it. I moved a friend’s site that I was hosting first: www.boxturtleheadstart.org, then K’s domain and email. fenris.org hasn’t been moved yet, I’m hoping to move the pwc patient database off of it first and on to the pwc main site. Of course, that’ll mean getting an updated version of php from our ISP. Once that’s done, I’ll move fenris.org which will make me happier than leaving it on a desktop machine (is it still a desktop if it is under my desk?).
• Finally, I’ve spent a huge amount of time working on the Piedmont Wildlife Center’s patient database. I tried to get board members and staff to help me write the functional specifications right the first time so that the programmer we hired could actually implement what we wanted. Unfortunately, what they gave me wasn’t really what they wanted. So now I’m going back and reworking a lot of the database. Fortunately, the whole thing is written using a model/view/controller (MVC) method of programming and it’s very easy to make changes. I’m also taking this as an opportunity to learn a lot more about the w3′s document object model (DOM), how it can be manipulated with javascript, and ajax while I’m at it. So far, my favorite pieces are the ajax bit to remotely pull/post database stats on the pwc main website and the dynamic form that allows you to automatically create new rows using javascript

Since no one really knows what the ick is and whether or not it is contagious (they’re sending the remains off for testing), K and the wildlife vet thought that it would be best to move the cage to a new spot and then clean it.  The problem is that the cages (right) are fairly heavy 6′ cubes made of wood and steel mesh.  Our first attempt to move it by picking it up would have taken between 4 and 6 people – we only had two.  This meant that we would probably have to take the cage apart, move the pieces and reassemble: something I did not want to have to do.

Employing creative laziness, I realized that we had a set of wheels attached to boards lying around the house.  By temporarily attaching them to the cage (left), I could construct a fully functional possum battle-cage! 

Once the wheels were attached, we were easily able to move the cage (see below for a re-enactment) to a spot 20′ away, remove the wheels and reposition the cage on the guard mesh it sits on.  All told, this only took 30 minutes: much less than the time needed to take down and reassemble it.

The other thing I need to do to finish this is to work on the temperature problem.  With the large vents (that I plan to shrink up a bit with plexiglass) and the big front, it loses heat faster than the small heaters we’ve put in there will add it.  I think the next plan is to put in some track lighting along the back and then I can add several of the low heat lamps (that won’t burn the snake if he touches them).

Sierra’s doing well. She and Darwin are getting along great. They’ll run around the yard, the house or even the couch, if given the chance. There is much mouth fencing. She’s still very curious about the cats – poor cats. Our house has turned in to baby/puppy-gate central. Sierra went to the vet on Saturday. She’s in great health, although it seems that she’s about 50 pounds (from her size, I had guessed 30 – 40).  Right now she’s sound asleep, snoring on the couch.
Work is busier than usual. I did manage to interview a couple of candidates for an open position. One did very well, so I’m hoping to get approval to extend an offer next week.

Finally, I spent part of today working on the outdoor turtle enclosure for K. The problem with a turtle enclosure is that it needs to have a mesh bottom, *and* it needs to be buried about 4-6 inches deep in order to allow the turtles to hibernate. I dug out the area a few weeks ago and then built a 16 inch tall enclosure. The enclosure’s about 24 square feet, so I figure I dug up about 12 cubic feet of dirt. This weekend, I picked up a center brace and some 1/2″ mesh and stapled the mesh to the bottom of the enclosure. I had to dig out the pit a little more, but was able to drop the enclosure in place fairly easily. I then had to put 12 cubic feet of dirt back into the enclosure. Now I just need to build and install the top.

Two or three weeks ago, we put them in the outside cage. Today we opened up the release door, we’ll see if they’re there in the morning.

Oh, and one very sad dog – feeling left out because he doesn’t get to play with the squirrels. Darwin, say “cheese”

We’ve got two here that were brought to us yesterday. They’re just now opening their eyes, so they are probably 5 or 6 weeks old. I know squirrels are tree rats. I know they aren’t threatened or endangered. I know that there are a host of animals that could use the extra protein. But let’s face it. Baby squirrels are adorable.

Pictures later.

In other snake news, K caught a picture of an eastern hog nose in its red phase in our front yard last week. S/he’s an absolutely beautiful snake. In case you can’t quite tell from the picture, the snake is extremely red at the front and it gradually fades to yeallow at the tail. Your science tidbit for the day: the eastern hog nose eats the occassional small mammal, but is particularly well adapted to eating frogs and toads. As you can imagine, the amphibians don’t like being eaten and have a tendency to inflate to prevent a snake from swallowing them. The eastern hog nose has its fangs in the upper back of its mouth. These fangs are used to paralyze and “deflate” a swollen frog to enable swallowing. The eastern hog nose apparently also plays dead if it can’t drive off predators. When it plays dead, it goes limp and sticks its tongue out – which, IIRC, is how I played dead when I was five.