Nanimals!

I thought I would share some animal adventures, since many of you are suffering the effects of my constant bird chatter. Below is a picture from work, it's actually my staff picture on the avian staff wall.  Kristen at work! Here I am with a horned puffin at work. This is Aleutian. He was born at the SeaLife Center and is still considered a juvenile. If I'm remembering right, he's about 4 years old, but puffins live for a long time-we have one tufted puffin that's 24. This summer will probably be the first time he gets breeding plumage. And yes, the white spot on my jacket is his poo. However, puffins can projectile poo up to about 4 feet, so he did poop more while he was on my shoulder, but it ended up far away on the floor where it was easy to clean.  Since it is winter, none of the puffins have summer breeding plumage. This is another horned puffin, Rain, in his winter plumage. 

   Below is a horned puffin with its breeding plumage. Pretty! In the background is a tufted puffin in breeding plumage. These are the two species of puffins in Alaska kickin back on some wood in our bird aviary this summer.  This is a tufted puffin taking a bath. Hooray for clean! This is a rhinoceros auklet. It's another species of puffin, but it was originally classified as an auklet. But since I'm talking about puffins: here's another!!!! Tyler's fishy fun lead to this animal encounter: Dolly Varden from an ice-fishing extravaganza! There's more of them in the Pyrex dish underneath his hands. We cooked these suckers up as our first fresh water Alaskan fish. We were going to take them to a party, but their flesh turned this grayish color we were embarrassed about, so we took little wieners instead. It was tasty the first day, but the next day this fish made the worst fish tacos I've ever had. And I was quite sad, because I really like fish tacos.