animalsatwildlilac

[animalsatwildlilac]

Starflight was very curious the about T-Rex today!

[animalsatwildlilac]

Following Stripey the bearded dragon around the animal studio.

[animalsatwildlilac]

Why gerbils?

I had a hamster when I was a kid and it wasn’t fun. He kept me up at night running on his wheel. When Hampty escaped from his godforsaken Habitrail and bore his way into the heating register and then into the airducts (we could hear him scratching) my mother pulled the vents apart trying to find him but one of our cats got to him first. I cried and cried – but let’s face it, I didn’t love that hamster. Who really loves a hamster? They are nocturnal, and tend to be grumpy and prone to biting when woken during the day (can you blame them?). I think hamsters would rather not be a child’s pet. Or if they are a child’s pet, they would rather like to be left alone. 

Gerbils are way better than hamsters. Not innately better animals, just innately better pets. They understand and enjoy “play time”, they are naturally curious, and they are blessedly diurnal.

When my kids asked for hamsters, I got them gerbils instead. I had gotten one gerbil for each kid, Diamond and Peaches, but Diamond died. This is a conundrum with gerbils – they are social and they should live in pairs, but inevitably, one of a bonded pair will die first. When I tried to replace Diamond with a new gerbil, Peaches had a temper tantrum and promptly killed the replacement. There was blood. My kids were okay with sharing Peaches, but they were also a little wary of her after that. Like I always say, pets are not for the faint-hearted. 

When we went on a family trip to Hawaii, I left a detailed note to the pet sitter. I won’t share all 12 pages of it (we had a lot of animals back then) but do just take a look at the section about the gerbil (circled in red), so you can see how simple gerbil care can be.

From: Nikki To: Bethany Sent: Saturday, Jan 8, 2010 5:21:06 PM Subject: a few notes about what we talked about earlier

Hi Bethany,

The walking sticks (right next to the fish tank) have been fed and shouldn’t need any attention.  Just spritz their bramble with water every day.

The gerbil’s cage will be clean.  No need to refresh her water bottle – should be fine for the week.  Each evening she gets a pine cone (in bag on front porch) a toilet paper roll (in bag near cage) and a small handful of gerbil food (also near cage).  In addition, please give her either a carrot, a small branch from our neighbor’s apple tree (like I showed you – only cut branches on our side of the fence), or a few pine nuts (in freezer). She’s very friendly and likes attention and affection.  Make sure the pile of books and wood stay on top Maple emerging from his sand bath (the blue vessel).of her cage top (because of the cats).  Her name is Peaches, but honestly, so what.

The good things about gerbils are many! They are desert animals and they literally bathe in sand. Watching a gerbil take a sand bath makes me swoon with love for their cuteness. 

Here we see Maple emerging from a sand bath (the blue vessel). 

Gerbils don’t drink much, so they don’t pee often, and their tank has no foul odor. Their favorite things to chew on are toilet paper rolls and pine cones.

Starlight and Sap love to explore in their play table, and really seem to genuinely enjoy interacting with the kids. Gerbils love to dig and tunnel. You never know where one might pop up!

Maple lost his partner gerbil pretty early on so he lives alone, but he likes to sit just inside his open cage door and commune with people.

Our gerbils, like our guinea pigs, are available to go home with WL families for weekends and other school breaks.

[animalsatwildlilac]

Dear Wild Lilac,

Thanks for the toilet paper rolls! They are my favorite! Please send more!

Love, 

Maple the Gerbil

[animalsatwildlilac]

Friday, March 5, 2021

In the afternoon Teacher Nikki helps some Daffodils feel comfortable holding and feeding some of the residents in the animal studio. She invites them to see how Rosie the axolotl gets fed. They feed and hold the guinea pigs and some cockroaches too.

[animalsatwildlilac]

Power Outage with Bearded Dragon

This beardie has a job. His name is Stripy, and he is a working lizard. His life is full of adventure at Wild Lilac preschool. But he does get weekends off, vacations, and even mental health days, just like me. I think he is lonely when we are not together.

On Thursday, when WL announced an early release because of the winter storm warning, I got the whole day off because I only teach in the afternoons. But I still needed to go in, briefly -- to tend to the animals before the roads got messy.

On the way there, I stopped for supplies at my local pet store, Tropical Hut. I bought 100 crickets and a package of frozen bloodworms.

When I parked in front of the school, rain was falling and the temperature was dropping. Masked parents were picking up their unmasked kids. I left 50 of the crickets in my car with plans to take them home for Stripy, my bearded dragon, and then I went to the animal room.

I fed and tucked our critters in –

Two cubes of bloodworms for the Axolotl;

Cucumber and carrots for the just-hatched baby snails;

Fresh pinecones and toilet paper rolls for the gerbils;

Hay for the new-found guinea pigs (see previous post);

Crickets in with the animals that eat crickets: the tarantula, the geckos, and the cane toad;

And food for the crickets themselves (some apple, some dog food);

The Madagascan Hissing cockroaches still had food;

The walking sticks are all out of bramble – I’m sorry, but they will be okay for a few days without food.

I headed home.

As I brought the deli container of crickets into my house (they had been in my car for about 45 minutes) I realized something was tragically wrong -- all 50 of them were on their backs, heels to heaven. My first though was carbon monoxide.  How could they all have DIED in such a short time? Then I realized maybe they weren’t dead – they were cold! Or did they freeze to death? It just hadn’t been that long. Such drama! I set them on a table and watched them, and as they warmed, they started to move. First a leg twitched, then another, then one flipped over. I was thinking how cool is this! Definitely something to explore with the kids – the freezing and warming of crickets.

And then, as I was deep in contemplation watching the flipping crickets, it’s 3 in the afternoon and -- the power goes out! There was no accumulation of ice or snow. The storm had hardly started. PGE said the power would be back on at 5pm. But at 5, they said 6, and at 6, it was 8.

When the temperature in Stripy’s tank dropped to 65 degrees, I had lifted him out and put him on my chest, zipped up a fleece vest over him, and put a fuzzy blanket around my shoulders.

My husband ventured out into the cold night to find a restaurant with power. He arrived home with salted peppered cod and garlic broccoli and kung pao shrimp from Powell Seafood, and the news that there were now 100,000 people without power in the greater Portland area.

At 8:03 our lights came on! Stripy was glad to get into his warm tank and eat some crickets. The humans were glad to catch up on what we had missed electronically in the past five hours.

Stripy poops biweekly, and does so in a predictable way – pretty much every time I put him in the bathtub; warm water brings it on for him like coffee does for me.

His poop in interesting. Part of it is white and rubbery, part of it loose and greenish brown.

At 2 in the morning my partner woke me. The power is off again, he says. PGE says the cause is under investigation and there is no estimated time for the power to return. In my Ambien induced slumber, I mumbled, “Please … bring me Stripy…”.

Stripy settled on my chest and closed his eyes. He clung to my nightie like a bur on a wool sweater, both of us covered with the duvet. Our dogs are not happy about Stripy joining us in the bed, and they move as close to my head as they can.

My partner kept checking on Stripy, to make sure he was staying on me, not straying into the sheets. But he needn’t worried. Why would this lizard leave the best heat source in the house -- a woman going through a menopausal transition?

Flanked by dogs, a lizard, and my partner who at this point in the pandemic has not just a beard, but a full wizard’s beard, we sleep. But not well. Our thermostat now says 54 degrees. I am worried about the crickets -- they are no longer chirping. but I am not going to snuggle them.

It is windy. My neighbor's roof is covered with snow and smoke is coming out of her chimney. Branches come down from the weight of ice. A car explodes and burns when a power line falls on it. All over Portland, people are lighting candles and caressing their reptiles, trying to keep them warm.

Stripy has two tanks – one at school, and one at home. His at-school tank is what I think of as his studio apartment; it’s furnished with a doll’s bed covered with a patchwork quilt, a hammock, a tiny ceramic toilet, and a small, hard copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. At home, he has a “desert” tank where I’ve built him tunnels and hillocks out of excavator sand.

In the summer, at the end of the day, he likes to join my family on the patio. We have cheese and crackers and glasses of chardonnay, and Stripy gets his own glass platter of mealworms. Yes, I know the mealworms are fatty and are supposed to be a treat, not a regular staple, which is why I’ve been trying to transition him to crickets. I want Stripy to chase crickets like how the beardie in the YouTube video chases blueberries, but he doesn’t.

I believe he doesn’t chase his food because he doesn’t have to.

He waits until a cricket crawls up on his hillock and then -- a quick snap nom nom nom -- he chomps on them. A drop of cricket juice spatters from his mouth.

But I know he still has his instincts, because I have watched him shoot across the patio to catch and eat a bee.

At school, the kids touch Stripy with one finger, and they know not to pet his head. Heads are personal spaces, and plus, that third eye! The first time I saw his third eye, I thought a child had drawn on him with marker.

When not roaming about the animal room, or sunning himself under a UV light, Stripy is carried in a woven sea grass basket filled with silks. He has castles built for him out of Magnatiles. The children pick fresh arugula for him from the garden and hand feed it to him. They sketch pictures of him that are pinned to the wall. The kids love him. They tell him this on a daily basis. They don’t imbue him with meaning, they just recognize him as sentient being.

The kids marvel at how his spikes look so sharp but are actually soft. They touch him and talk about his textures and colors, the orange rings encircling his eyes, his soft belly, his pointy tail. We watch his torso expand as he sighs, relaxing into his body.

What are those holes in the sides of his head?

What do you think they are?

Can he hear me? Why aren’t his ears on the outside like mine?

Will he lick me?

He might.

Why did he lick me!

He is tasting you. He’s finding out who you are.

This bearded dragon, does he know how to fly?

Not yet.

Well, his mommy needs to teach him!

I ask him questions in front of the kids … Stripy, do you want some dandelion greens? Oh, you do!  Oh, Stripy, I can see you don’t want to be held right now. You want to move across the floor on your own!

I regularly give animacy to inanimate objects, too.

What is he saying now, Teacher Nikki?

What do you think he is saying?

Caring for animals helps us to build compassion. I want the kids to know that the animals are communicating with us, we just have to listen.

Sometimes, on my way home from work when I stop at Trader Joes, Stripy tells me that he doesn’t want to be left alone in the car, so I set him on my shoulder and he lies very still (but is supremely alert and watches everything) as I walk around the frozen foods and the wine aisles. Kids always notice him and want to connect. The crew usually notice him, too, and greet him with a wink. My sister, who likes animals but doesn’t have any, when I tell her about my experiences in Trader Joes with Stripy, says “Oh, Nik-Nac, you’ve become one of those people.”

And yes, I guess I have, it’s true. I have become that lady with the bearded dragon.

No, we are not supposed to have a lizard in a preschool -- because of the salmonella risk. However, I believe that risk is an inherent and natural consequence of childhood. Our preschoolers take turns on a broken seesaw that was homemade to begin with. They build with crates and cardboard boxes we scavenge from the furniture store on the corner. There is sometimes a sprinkling of nails in our sandbox. We have earthquakes here, and floods, and ice-storms.  Our children breathe harmful air from wildfires. We have lockdown drills to prepare us for potential active shooters in our schools – a little salmonella isn’t going to shut things down for us!

In my more than 30 years of teaching with animals, I have probably exposed thousands of children to salmonella. It will be okay. For those of you who are still worried, let me tell you a little story.

I hosted a special COVID sleepover for some school-age kids recently (the kids were all from the same pod) and when it was discovered that one child had forgotten to bring a tooth brush, I said, “that’s okay, just borrow someone’s toothpaste and brush with your finger.” I mimed a demonstration and all the kids made faces of disgust. “I would never brush my teeth with my finger,” I heard. “I put my fingers in my butt too much!”

We do wash our hands as often as possible.

[animalsatwildlilac]

What’s happening in the Animal Room? by Teacher Nikki

When I was growing up on a farm in rural Michigan in the 1970's, we had lots of animals. but we didn't have a pony, and I wanted one. I wished for a pony, and I begged for a pony. We did have geese, and chickens, and goats, and horses, and a pig, but for some reason, a pony was where my parents drew the line. As it happened, one day, as I was looking out over the back fields beyond our acres, I saw a little pony. Glory be! I shouted out to my mother. “Mama! There’s a pony!” She couldn’t believe it either. It turned out, the pony had escaped from a neighbor, and we eventually reunited that little guy with his owner, but for the few days when that pony lived in our pasture, and in our barn, I really did believe that there was a power somewhere listening to my wants, and reacting to my prayers.

*

           For the last few months, I have been contemplating the sanity of getting a second pair of guinea pigs for the Animal Room. The ones we have, Carrots and Fuzzle (I found them on craigslist) are beloved to our community. During our Covid closure, they stayed in the homes of multiple WL families, and brought joy everywhere they went.

           These days, when Carrots and Fuzzle are not in their cage in the Animal Room, or in their outdoor pen in the meadow, or in some child’s arms, they live on my dining room table. Pre-Covid, I brought them to school with me at 10:30 in the morning (when my teaching day began) then home again in the evening. Now, I bring them to school with me at 2pm. I’ve felt bad that the kids haven’t had access to them in the mornings.

           Someone asked me, “Why don’t you just leave Carrots and Fuzzle at school full time so the kids can be with them in the morning?” And surely, C&F would be fine staying at school at night. But … I feel sad leaving them. I like to have the guinea pigs at home at night because I like to hear their happy noises when I share my chopped dinner salad with them.

           So, for the last few months, I have been considering -- (as I study craigslist after taking Ambien) would it be a good idea to get another pair of guinea pigs? Ones who could be at school all the time? Who could be there to greet the kids in the morning? Or would that be … excessive? And that is why it was remarkable when, last Sunday morning, my neighbor Julianna, who lives in the corner house, called me. I answered right away, even though I was still in bed, because sometimes my dog, Enzo, escapes our yard to go visit her dog, Gracie, and Julianna calls to let me know that Enzo is on her porch scratching to be let in her front door for a doggie date.

           Julianna got right to the point. “Do you know where your guinea pigs are?” she asked.

           I looked at my partner, Stevan, who was right next to me, listening in on the phone call. He leapt out of bed and ran downstairs and then shouted back upstairs, “Carrots and Fuzzle are right here!”

           “I figured they were with you,” Julianna said, “but I had to check.”

           “What’s going on?” I laughed. “Do you have some guinea pigs on your porch scratching to get in?”

           She told me the crows had been diving at something in her front yard, and her cat (a Maine Coon) was yowling and trying to get out the front window. She thought maybe there was an injured squirrel, but when she stepped out to investigate, what she saw were two guinea pigs trying to take cover in her rhododendrons. “I tried to catch them,” Julianna said, “but I couldn’t, so I called my daughter – she was in the Peace Corps in Peru and had some experiences catching guinea pigs, and she explained how to set up a trap, and now I’ve caught them, and I have them in a box, and I’d keep them -- they’re darling, but I think my cat will kill them if he gets the chance.” Then she texted me a picture of the guinea pigs in a box. I told her I’d be right over.

           They appear to be a father and son. My best guess is that they were dumped by somebody who thought they had two males, and then one of the males had a baby, and that was just too much to handle. The baby is young – I’m guessing less than a month old, and is a little shy. The father is bold and outgoing, and I imagine from the scars on his ears, he’s been in multiple tussles.

           Many of your kids have spent time getting to know the new piggies  – there have been lots of snuggles, lots of hand-feeding of lettuce and cucumbers, and lots of discussion about what we might name them.

Questions your kids have asked about the new guinea pigs:

How do you know they are boys?

Why can’t we let them get married to Fuzzle and Carrots and they can all have babies together?

Why do they poop so much?

Why do they pee so much?

Why do Carrot and Fuzzle like celery, but the new guinea pigs don’t?

           I have talked with the kids at length about why Carrots and Fuzzle, who are sisters, cannot be in the same cage with the new guys.

           The new guys will be staying at the school full time, but they are available to go home with families over weekends and vacations – and so are Carrots and Fuzzle! They come with a cage, food, and 24 hour support-as-needed! Please contact me if you are interested! 

[animalsatwildlilac]

Cypress and Wally's guinea pig Calvin visited the garden today!

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Discovering a leopard gecko!

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“Tojo can become a ball, I wish I could do that.” - Max

“I can. Watch!” - Lou

“Hmmm... well maybe I can too.” - Max

“I can’t do that.” - Niko

“Do you know how to bring your arms and legs in close to your belly?” - Valarie

“Oh! Yes, I’ll try!” - Niko

[animalsatwildlilac]

[animalsatwildlilac]

Tess: Gerbils are predators or carnivores.

Soli: he disappeared! In the house!

Owen SL: They like to go in the spinny thing to go around and around and around.

Finn: they're go fast!

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Getting to observe some new baby hermit crabs (both alive and dead)

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This morning, our first time together after the winter break, many Irises were eager to share what they had done during the break. Our morning meeting focused on all the different ways the Irises spent their time. Their were several playdates mentioned, a hotel stay, a plane ride to visit grandma, visits from cousins, uncles, grandparents and friends, presents opened and played with and new pets. Everyone had something interesting to share. A few children chose to share details with me in a one on one conversation.

There was also a lot of interest in checking out the new residents in our animal studio. A new gerbil, some baby hermit crabs, 3 giant millipedes and some minnows to play with Rosie, the axolotl.

Valarie

[animalsatwildlilac]

Solomon: I think they're sleeping.

Kiki: I think they're scared.

Evie: Well I think they're trying to look like sticks.

Kiki: but I can tell they're not sticks because they have antennas and sticks dont have antennas.

Solomon: Well they cant be sticks but they can look like sticks.

Kiki: do you ever wonder why we can walk?

Evie: yeah! I wonder that.

Kiki: Yeah, it's kind of weird. How do we walk?!

Solomon: well we have feet.

Evie: Do walking sticks have feet?

Kiki: yeah that's how you can tell they're not sticks.

Solomon: and they eat.

Kiki: yeah, they eat leaves.

[animalsatwildlilac]

Mei was so excited to try and talk to Rosie the Axolotl today. "I don't know if she can hear me..." she noticed. Then Rosie started to move! She followed Mei's finger up until she was standing up on her hind legs! "I don't know if she can see me... but she's following me!"

[animalsatwildlilac]

The Irises observe a number of different animal skulls including mouse, guinea pig, cat, and raccoon!