Another typical day…

Today has been another exciting day here at Paradise Gardens.

First, some good news.  We gave Athena another chance to eat a mouse and she was victorious!  After playing with it for a little while,she actually ate it.  We also witnessed another important behavior that shows that she is on her way to becoming a wild animal.  When we first released the mouse into her cage, one of her kitty roommates went for it and she actually attacked the kitty and claimed the mouse for herself.  Don’t worry, the kitty wasn’t hurt…just startled.  

The other big excitement of the day was that the lovebird’s cage door was left open and one escaped.  Everyone is very concerned because he could easily become prey to any number of other animals…especially the falcon, who had gone missing this morning and missed her morning feeding.  Of course, the falcon showed up shortly after the lovebird’s escape so there was a stressful few minutes while Jen ran to get the falcon’s breakfast and the rest of us kept a nervous watch on the lovebird.  

This has been a big day for acquiring new animals, too.  First, Jen came home with a little, tiny baby kitty.  Then Ryan came back with a bunny.  Neither of these are the kinds of wild animals that Paradise Gardens is supposed to be acquiring  but they are both adorable.   We just got a phone call that a woman found a baby “ant bear” that was being sold on the side of the road.  We will know in about an hour what exactly it is…anteater?  coati?

Another awesome video!

Some people are really awesome. Some people come here and take awesome photos and send them to us (if you have awesome photos, send them to us! paradisegardensboquete@gmail.com). Some people take awesome videos and send them to us (same, same). Some people take awesome videos, edit them together, narrate and post them on youtube and send them to us. How. Awesome. Is. That.

Click here for Awesome.

This videos a bit old… the Hyacinth Macaws (the bright blue ones) are gone. Sumi the kinkajou is gone (the animal at the very beginning of the video, yawning with her long tongue). Han Solo the squirrel monkey is gone. The particular jaguarundi in this video is gone, but we have another one, just a cub, here now. But the message is still the same. We are not a zoo, we do not buy or sell animals. We are a rescue for animals who would not make it in the wild. We welcome guests and invite them to interact with the animals when it is in the best interest of the animals to have human interaction (for example the birds that will be here forever need talking to, Sam the Moluccan cockatoo loves getting his head scratched). We release animals as soon as they are able to survive in the wild. Anyway, great video, halfthrottle, and thank you so much for sharing it with us!

Jaguarundi Learns to Hunt, Part Two!

Jaguarundi learns to hunt in the aviary

So we called around to the big cat rescues we have been in touch with and asked about how we could improve the baby jaguarundi’s hunting skills. She is living with two house kittens right now and we’ve been trying to catch mice everyday to throw in their cage. The problem is that the kittens are a bit older and a bit more advanced than the jaguarundi and so they catch the mice but, when we put three mice in the jaguarundi kitten tries but usually her mouse escapes through the wire of the cage. She isn’t fast enough and sometimes we only catch two mice in a night so we put them in and only the kittens get the mice. So the new idea… let the jaguarundi out to catch mice.

The mouse population in the aviary is out of control. Every time I go in there I see mice everywhere, stealing the birdseed and the bananas we leave out for the birds. We try to put the food in places that mice would have trouble getting to but they are smart mice. So it seemed to be the perfect place to let the jaguarundi loose to learn to hunt.

We tried it yesterday morning and this morning. We let the jaguarundi out by himself at first but he just sniffed the ground and the rocks and walked very slowly and cautiously. So we put the two kittens in there with him. They didn’t exactly get mice but they learned to stalk and pounce… each other.

Stalking each other in the aviary

We tried it again this morning, first the white cat by herself. She seems to be the best hunter (we named her Artemis after the greek goddess of the hunt) so we thought that if she caught a mouse she could then show the others how. She chased the mice and caught two. Each time she ran around for a bit with them in her mouth, apparently looking for a good place to set it down. Each time she set it down in a corner, batted it around a bit, picked it up again, set it down and then it escaped. So we brought the other kitten (we named her Hestia in honor of the goddess of the hearth, also Artemis’s buddy, or so it is said) and the jaguarundi (Athena, goddess of war, buddy of Hestia and Artemis) and set them loose. They seemed to have no interest in controlling the burgeoning mouse population.  Instead the pounced on each other, again and again and again. So no mice caught but maybe its good practice.