One of the first animals I met when I started working at the zoo back in 1999 was Mary Ellen, a lynx. She’d been hit by a car just off O’Malley Road – practically in front of the zoo’s entrance – and was being kept in the infirmary to mend her broken leg.
Truth be told, that had been way too many months earlier; she was simply not healing the way the vet wanted her to. They would clean her wound, bandage it up nice and tight, and put her out into her enclosure – and she would drag it around on the ground and get it all infected again. The poor girl had spent more time in the infirmary than out of it during the 9 months since she arrived at the zoo, and she was not a happy camper.
The curator of the zoo, Pat Lampi (who has since moved on to become the Director of the zoo), was the one who always had to dart Mary Ellen to get her out of her enclosure and into the infirmary. He was also the one who tended to her and gave her the shots required to sedate her for any treatment she received.
She hated him.
Any time he came into view she’d start growling. If he got closer, she’d hiss and back up. It was kind of sad, actually. Pat just wanted to help her – but she didn’t understand. All she knew was that whenever he came around, she got shot.
After a year of continually re-infecting the wound, the vet finally decided that amputation was called for. He had tried everything he could think of to save the leg, but it just wasn’t working. So, off it came. Barely a week later, and that cat was running around in her enclosure like a spring chicken again! Cats are agile and sure-footed creatures by nature, so getting along with only 3 legs was no challenge at all.
Or so we thought.
That fall, when things got slick with ice & snow – she fell and broke her one remaining hind leg! Back she went to the infirmary again. This time, the vet had to put her leg back together with a steel rod and pins – which I must say makes for some really cool X-rays. They’re still hanging up in the infirmary to show people that come to visit.
While she was recovering from that surgery, the maintenance staff put up some handicap ramps with no-slip mats in her enclosure, so she could get up to the high platforms (where a cat just needs to be) without risking another fall.
Quick: What do you call a group of more than one lynx? Answer: a chain
Get it? Lynx = links = chain…
Sorry, that’s such a bad joke. But I love it, still – and typically get a good chuckle from it when I tell it to a group of kids.
Anyway, five years later we got two kittens who had been orphaned in the wildfires that summer: two girls we named Kaltag and Venetie (pronounced Vee-na-tie, like to tie your shoe). Originally they were put in the enclosure with Mary Ellen, but we quickly realized they were too rambunctious for her. Not only is she handicapped but she also is fairly old for a lynx. We ended up moving Mary Ellen to a different enclosure on the other side of the zoo, what I like to call her retirement home, while the kittens got the larger enclosure.
Coming to us at such a young age means the kittens never really acquired the fear of humans that a wild animal normally has. Not that they’re tame, by any means. But – if he’s careful and sticks close to the gate for a quick exit if needed - their handler, Jim Rutkowski, can go in with them. He plays with them using their favorite toy: a long stick with a string on the end of it.
They get so excited, just like my own cat. A lynx is much larger than a house cat of course, even at the kitten stage, so Jim really has to stretch sometimes to get the toy up above them. And with those powerful hind legs, they can really jump & run – a skill that serves them well in the wild as they chase after their preferred animal of prey: the snowshoe hare.
We got another orphaned kitten just 2 years ago; this time a little boy we named Tony. Each new animal has to spend time in quarantine to ensure they don’t introduce any parasites or illnesses, so he lived in the retirement home with Mary Ellen for a while - separated from her by a temporary fence but still close enough that he wasn’t lonely – before moving in with the girls in the larger enclosure.
As we all know: boy-kooties are icky. The girls wanted nothing to do with him at first. But they are all young and playful, so soon enough they were romping around together. I honestly can’t even tell them apart now, but perhaps Jim can.
They did manage to get in to trouble a few years ago. Big trouble!
They have many trees in their enclosure which we have wrapped with chicken wire around the base to protect the cats from clawing them, and with 3 feet of metal sheeting up at the 8’ level to prevent the cats from climbing out. One of the girls found a tree whose metal sheeting had come loose, so she was able to climb up the tree really, really high. Only then did she remember that she had no idea how to get back down. That poor cat was stuck up there for over a week, while all the zookeepers tried to think of ways to get her down manually.
None of our ladders are long enough to reach, and even if they were nobody wanted to be up a tree with a wild cat. We couldn’t dart her, because then she’d fall and get injured. The proverbial “open can of tuna” didn’t work. We even thought of calling the fire department (“Help! My cat is stuck up a tree!”) but their ladder truck would not have fit on the trails.
Thankfully she found a way to get herself down eventually. We have since re-wrapped that particular tree, and keep a closer eye on all of them.
Check out the pictures from the Zoo’s Photographer: http://johngomes.smugmug.com/ALASKA_ZO0_ANIMALS/189637
They are truly beautiful animals. They died out in the UK during the middle ages, but recently there has been some talk of a reintroduction programme, probably in Scotland. I will do a post about it on my blog at some time. Incidentally, I fully intend to steal that joke about the name for a group of Lynx- perhaps we can establish a new term in the vocabulary...
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