It’s springtime at Fauna!

Yesterday I spent the day volunteering (as I usually do on Tuesdays) at The Fauna Foundation. If you missed my first piece on Fauna you can read it here.

It was a beautiful spring day and most of the chimps were out enjoying the warmth and the sunshine. Spring bulbs were popping up throughout the beautiful gardens and everything was as lovely as could be.

We had some volunteer visitors in from Vancouver who were helping with the raking and other outdoor chores. On Monday they had worked on making enrichment packages for the chimps so there wasn’t much left for me to do in the way of enrichment this week so I only made up a few small packages.

All of the toys and other enrichment items that we use at Fauna for the chimps must be purchased brand new. Sometimes they don’t last very long because the chimps can be, er…kind of rough on their toys. Being a big old softy I can’t stop myself from hugging each stuffed animal before it is sent into battle…you never know if it will come back in one piece or not. Sometimes the toys last for a long time and there are others that you only see once. It’s probably a good thing that I never see the stuffed animal cadavers and pieces that come out of the enclosures on cleaning day – my heart is too soft to be exposed to that sort of stuff.

Once I had finished with enrichment I went over to the office to prepare some chimp adoption packages. You can symbolically adopt one (or more) of the wonderful Fauna chimps at this link:
http://www.adopt-a-chimp.com/

When you do you will receive an adoption package containing lots of information on the chimp you adopted – it might even be one of the packages that I lovingly prepared today :o)

While I was working on the adoption packages Sierra (one of the numerous adopted dogs at Fauna) was crashed out on the couch and snoring up a storm. She is HUGE and she’s so sweet and loveable! She suffers from double hip dysplasia and severe heart murmur, but despite her pain she’s friendly and fun-loving and so obviously happy to be alive and loved by all.

When I was done with the adoption packages I worked on some other packages that are sent out to people who send their first donations to Fauna. When that was finished they didn’t have any other work for me to do so I walked around a bit with my camera and took a few shots of the beautiful grounds at Fauna.

Sierra was outside soaking up the sun and the ducks and geese were in the mood to pose for me.




I can’t wait to go back next week :o)


(photos used with permission and provided by the Fauna Foundation)

Kathleen (aka TheNatureNut)