PPC: July 7, 2010

I cleaned exhibits this morning. I forgot to write yesterday about tufted puffin 7 who is ill. My coworker observed her breathing very heavily in the exhibit at the end of the day. She was taking extremely exaggerated breaths and heaving with an open beak for each breath. She was in the water but my coworker mentioned to me that the last puffin to act like this died the next day. We caught her up and put her in a brooder box with a tube supplying oxygen attached. She was kept in the box overnight and seemed to be doing better. The puffin was moved the next day to the brooding room upstairs and was heaving at the top of the little area that was given. She was still observed breathing by heaving her chest visibly with each breath. She was taken to the hospital where, during x-rays, she began crashing so was then taken care of to become stable. Once back in the brooding room, she was put back on oxygen to help her breathing.

I cleaned exhibits, as I mentioned, and noticed some fairly normal behavior from the birds. During feeding, one of the king penguins, Captain, has been eating many many herring. When I go to feed the other birds, Captain will take his beak and rub it on the back of my leg. It certainly tickles and I believe I gave him another fish just so he would be content.

Later, when I fed the birds in the afternoon, I had some extra herring from the morning and they were fairly small. Woody was following me and hopping along near me so I assumed he was hungry. Normally, Woody does not do anything more than awkwardly bite at herring but when I offered him a smaller herring, I guess his hunger won the battle as he ate not one, but two herring. One of which, was a decent sized fish especially for a little rockhopper penguin. I was proud of him. Also, he continued to feed when I helped him with the tray of fish. When I had come back to feed herring to the kings, one of the trays I had put over in the far area was already empty. Later, I found more fish that I had not put on the trays for the exhibits.