A Saturday off

Yesterday I had the day off of work, so I tried to organize a hiking/geocaching expedition to include some folks I don't usually get to hike with since my normal day off is Monday. Well, everyone ended up having other things come up so it was just me and my usual hiking buddy, Sherrie.

The hike I planned first required a drive up into the mountains to get to where we could hike. Not a whole lot of elevation change on the hike itself - we started at about 9300 feet and got to around 9750 at the top of Ormes Peak. A few of the aspen have started to change, but we're still a few weeks away from peak color. We found two caches on top of Ormes Peak. If you're unfamilar with geocaching, check out this site: www.geocaching.com

This photo of Pikes Peak was taken from the summit of Ormes Peak.

We saw quite a bit of wildlife including blue grouse, mountain chickadees, mountain bluebirds and Colorado chipmunks. Oh, and a ton of ladybugs on top of the peak.
This is one of the mountain chickadees.

We ended up hiking 8.5 miles, which I think was our second longest hike this season.

Happy Trails!!

Bringing up baby

I spent today caring for Mahal, our baby orangutan, so I thought I'd use today's blog space to explain what is involved with raising a baby orangutan the right way.

Raising a baby ape by hand is something we really don't want to do at all. Both Hadiah (Mahal's mom) and Kwisha (the mom of Umande the gorilla whom we raised last year) were young, inexperienced moms who were hand-raised themselves. As such, they were scared when their little ones came into the world and as a result chose the "hands off" approach. In both of these cases we tried for several days to give the babies back to mom, hoping she'd eventually want the baby back. But in both cases we had to raise the babies.

Once we decide that we have to hand-raise, our already arranged just-in-case team of hand-raisers steps in and from then on it is a 24/7 commitment to the little one. Mahal's team consists of 12 people working mostly 8-hour shifts around the clock. We have a night nursery set up in part of our kitchen which has a bed in it for the night caregiver. If his orangutan mom was raising him, he would be clinging onto her for the first several months of his life. We mimic this as much as possible, although we have to encourage him to be more independent than normal so we can reintroduce him at a younger age.

We wear scrubs when caring for Mahal and he is required to hold onto the scrubs whenever we're moving around, just as he'd cling to mom's hair. Sometimes he grabs our hair or skin, too! We spend as much time each day next to the other orangutans as we can. They can touch him through the mesh as long as they're being gentle. This helps him to know what orangutans are, so he won't be afraid of them when we put him back. When he's visible to the public or to other orangutans, he never has diapers on. We don't want the orangutans to be confused or the public to think he's make a good pet (he would not!). This lack of diapers means we often get peed or pooped on - thankfully scrubs dry quickly!

Mahal drinks human baby formula out of human baby bottles several times a day. We try to encourage him to take his bottle through the mesh of the exhibit, since that's how he'll have to drink it when he's back with the other orangutans. We also offer him some solid foods (he has 3 teeth), but food seems to repulse him right now. We spend our day playing with him, feeding him, and even sleeping with him.

Mahal was 4.4 lbs when he was born on April 4 and is now ~11.5 lbs. We hope one of our other orangutans will be interested in adopting him in a couple months.

First Entry

I thought it might be fun to get in on the blogging thing, just as a way to keep in touch and let friends and family know what's going on in my life. So, in starting this, I won't go back and tell you about my month or year. I'll just start with now.

It's a lazy Sunday afternoon here in Colorado. I think fall has finally arrived after a long, hot summer. Temperatures are topping off in the 60s today, which feels great. The Chiefs lost their first game today and the Broncos pulled off a win with time expired (big frowny faces to both of those!).

I had church and Bible class this morning. Our youth group led the service and recounted their experiences at the recent National Youth Gathering in Orlando. Tonight, I have my first class of Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University. I'll keep you posted on how that goes. I'm really looking forward to it.

The picture above is of Mahal, the baby orangutan that consumes much of our time at work. We're hand-rearing him, since his mom didn't know what to do with him. He is now 5 months old.