Hi, buddy, are you ready?  Breakfast time.  What's going on?  You watch out, this goes this way.  Watch out.  Whoa.  All the way around, good boy.  Come here, dude.  Come here.  What do you think?  That was dinner last night.  Hi.  Here, yeah, I know you want some, you want some app-no, no apple.  So that's not my favorite.  This is your favorite.  Yeah.  There you go.  Hi guys, welcome back to Animal Wonders.  We're checking in with Huckleberry today and I'm gonna give you a quick update.

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What do you think?  Get the best stuff.  What is it going to be?  Apple and spinach.  Mm, that does sound good actually.  It's been a few weeks since you've seen him and in that time, we've built him a new water tank.  The big challenge with beavers is that they are semi-aquatic, so they need some place to swim or be in water and that's a pretty big challenge when they're living in captivity.  That's compounded with his ataxia, which means that he has poor gross motor skills and he will fall off balance every once in a while, so we have to build a safe way for him to access his water.

So it's morning time right now and I'm just checking in with him.  He's eating his breakfast now and I am gonna--here you go, bud--I'm gonna show you what it takes to clean this guy's space.  Alright, I'm going to put him in the corner here so he's out of the way.  You can see that he's building a little nest over here, so I'm going to put his food over here.  Come here, dude.  Are you ready?  There you go, here, here, food food food food.  There you go.  You stay out of the way.

Alright, I'm gonna go get my supplies now.  Alright, you ready guys?  This is basically like a water sucker.  I dunno, it's gonna suck up all of this water that Huck has pooped in.  Whaaa.  Alright, so this is still obviously a work in progress.  This is the second day we've attempted this and so everything is new and uh, we just--we just have poop water everywhere, you know?  That's fine.

Okay, so the new plan is to fill up the tank and then just manually empty the tank instead of having it go off.  Eventually maybe we'll figure something out better but that's what we're doing right now.  Take two.  Oh God!  Why won't you stay in?  Bleaugh.  Stop the flood, guys, that's gross.  Oh my gosh.  Okay.  Okay.  It wasn't that bad.  It wasn't terrible.  We got this.  Here's the tank.  Alright, let's finish it off.  We're gonna rinse this side out and turn it on at the same time.  

He-hey, success!  You go over there.  You're doing all right.  There you go, buddy.  Yeah.  More fresh water.  You smell it?  You'll get used to this.  You're gonna be fine.  Alright.  That's pretty good.  I don't want it too deep right now.  He's still not very confident in his swimming abilities, so we're just gonna keep it wading level and he's doing pretty good.  I mean, he didn't like the loud noises but he settled down and he's munching now so he's gonna get used to it. 

He's doing it so soft so I don't know if you guys can hear, but he is doing this little happy whistle.  It's just this really high pitched soft whistle.  I'm just gonna try and get him to practice going up and down this.  I just wanna make sure I'm watching him to see if he can do it and he's been doing a really good job on it actually.  Just every once in a while, he'll fall sideways but as he gets bigger, it seems like he's getting stronger, too.  

Beavers are very, very social in the wild and they would stay with their parents for two years and they'd have their older siblings with them as well and then in their second year, they would have their younger siblings.  They do a lot of just hanging out with each other.  Sometimes I'll just come and just sit in his space with him and he'll walk over and kind of slump down next to me and put his back up against my leg and we'll just hang out together and that's really important for his mental well-being because he is such a social animal.

As far as his future goes, we don't know what that holds.  With his ataxia, that could prevent him from having a companion and it's really hard to introduce beavers.  We actually don't know what sex he is.  As he gets older, we'll for sure determine if he's male or female and then he'll need the opposite sex and then that interaction might not even go through.  I mean, these guys are individuals.  You can't make them like each other, so future's up in the air right now.  We're just going to go at his pace and see where he leads us.

Wanna go for a swim, buddy?  What do you think?  Show me how you get down that rock.  You got it.  I know.  Show me how you step down.  Ohh, what a good boy.  Nicely done.  That was a little stumbly but you caught yourself really well.  Do you want to go into the water?  What do you think?  Oh yeah.  And I'll come out and I will just see him laying in the water which is really good.  You can see, look at this buddy, move your tail.  He is already christened the new water.  Water is such a stimulant for them.  It's very important for their digestive system as well, so even though it's a big pain to clean, it's really important for him.  Hi.  Oh, I know.  

Thanks for joining us.  If you'd like to go on an adventure with us every week, subscribe to our YouTube channel AnimalWondersMontana.  Thanks guys.  

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