Hi everyone.  Welcome back to Animal Wonders.  My name is Taylor and today, I thought that we should have some fun in the snow. 

(Intro)

As a keeper here at Animal Wonders, one of my jobs is to give the animals behavioral enrichment or BE.  In the wild, our animals would be foraging, hunting, climbing, running, flying, or anything else that would help them survive, but since they live in captivity, we do our best to provide them with behavioral enrichment and stimulate some of those natural behaviors.  BE gets them thinking and moving and using their senses the way they would in the wild.  

Since we're located in Montana, the winters here can be really harsh, but they do provide one of my favorite types of enrichment: snow!  Most of our animals don't have access to snow every day.  They either live indoors because they're native to much warmer environments, or they live in enclosures where they can't have contact with any wild animals that could spread diseases, so before the snow all melts away, I wanna let a few of our animals have some fun with it.  Today, I'm gonna make three snowmen and give them to a few of our animals.

We put a poll on Patreon and our Patrons voted for Lollipop the striped skunk and Mimi the black tufted marmoset and I decided to include Ophelia the opossum, just for fun.  I'm gonna use a few treats to entice them and get them to use some of their foraging adaptations.  So let's head outside and get started.

(montage)

Now we have all our snowmen ready so let's bring out the animals.  So first up is Lollipop, our striped skunk.  You ready to do some exploring?  What do you think?  Ooh.  Do those smell pretty good?  There you go.  So these guys in the wild, they have pretty terrible eyesight.   They'd be nocturnal so when they're finding food, they're using their nose a lot so if you watch while she's exploring her snowman, she'll use her nose a lot to find treats more than other things.  Yeah.  You got the arm!  Nice job.  

What do you think, what else is there?  Snow is really awesome for animals because it brings in new smells and new things to touch.  It's really cold and wet so it's just something new and different that they can interact with.  What do you think?  Yeah?  Did you find all the good stuff?  You know I don't have any more.  Oh, and there goes his head.  She's using her feet a little bit.  

In the wild, these guys would use their huge claws on their front feet and they'd be digging and tearing apart things.  They can use them to tear apart logs.  They can also dig up fruits and veggies and things like that.  Do you smell that?  It's over here.  She's like, "I'd much rather just explore."  

Even though she didn't interact with it as much as we were hoping, she was still having fun, she was still exploring something new.  Alright, Lollipop, you ready?  Let's go see our next animal.

So this is Mimi's snowman.  It's the smallest out of the three, but compared to her, it's her size, so this is probably gonna be a little bit weird for her.  Ooh, she got the blueberry.  Good job, hun.  Blueberries are definitely one of her favorites.

Usually when we come in to feed her, the fruit is the--her favorite thing and if I don't give her a piece of fruit right away, she gets really angry and she's like, no, no, no, I want the fruit first, so I'm not surprised she went for that blueberry.  Mimi is really fun to give a lot of BE to because in the wild, these guys are very social, they'd have lots of companions they'd be hanging out with and interacting with every day, so for our purposes, we have to give her a lot of enrichment.  We have to give her lots of things to get her moving and jumping and climbing and doing all the things she would do in the wild.  I feel like she's kind of scared of it.  

In the wild, black tufted marmosets would live in the rainforest in the Amazon, so they're very very unlikely to encounter snow down there, so for her, this is probably something totally different from what she would be prepared for at all in the wild.  It's cold and wet and probably something that she wouldn't ever see.  We have given her a little snowball before, but this is probably the first time she's ever seen a lot of snow shaped like a human in her enclosure.  Alright, do you want to see the banana I hid for you?  What's in here?  Wanna go check it out?  Is there a banana in there?  A really cold banana?  What do you think, hun?  She's like, it's in there, but I don't know if it's worth it to pull it out.  

So she's doing little whining noises, little high-pitched, kind of sounds like squeaks and those are her complaining a little bit because this is probably very cold and she's not used to getting any cold, like, super cold treats so she's like, ehh, I want it but it's really cold.  I was really hoping she would play with the snow a little bit more, but since it's about the same size as her, I am impressed that she at least went up to it and was confident enough to pull the pieces of food off, so that was good.

Alright, so Mimi and I had a lot of fun, but now we're gonna go give our third snowman to our last animal.  Ophelia's still sleeping right now, so we're gonna have to wake her up, and then hopefully she'll come out and want to have fun with our snowman.  Hi, pretty girl.  What do you think?  I got some treats out here.  Do you want to come explore them?

So Ophelia, our opossum, is actually missing one of her legs, so she moves around pretty slow, so other opossums in the wild would be much faster than this, but she takes it at her own pace.  What do you think, hun?  What is that?  Do you smell those treats?  Yeah.  Is that really cold?  What do you think?  Noses are the best, aren't they?  

They also have 50 really very sharp teeth and when she eats, she's very lip-smacky, but those teeth, she would use in the wild to help eat, but they also use them to scare off predators, so if something comes up and she gets startled, she'll show off all her teeth and hiss and she'll try to scare them away and say, look out, I have really big sharp teeth, stay away from me.  

What do you think?  Is that pretty good?  You didn't like that yam that much, did you?  What do you think, pretty girl?  Yaah.  That's a good blueberry.  She can smell those yogurt drops, but I don't know if she's sure where they're at.  Oh, good job.  They're also omnivores, so in the wild, they'll eat all kinds of stuff.  In the winter, they have a much smaller variety of foods they can choose from, but she would eat fruits and veggies and insects, any little meat that she comes across, she would eat.  

They're very opportunistic.  Oh, good job!  Now you got 'em.  There you go, Ms. Ophelia.  It looks like she's eating ice cream.  Opossums have an excellent sense of smell.  Similar to Lollipop the skunk, they're also nocturnal, so during the day, they're gonna be sleeping and hanging out somewhere, and then at night, they'll come out and they'll start looking for food, so she has a very, very, very great sense of smell, so when she is finding food, similar to Lollipop as well, she's using her nose a lot.  What do you think, hun?  There's a couple mealworms at the top.  Wanna eat that mealworm?  Aw, yeah!  Good job, hun.

The animals all seem like they had a ton of fun.  Thank you so much for joining me and sharing in all of our snow fun.  If you'd like to help us make more videos like this one, become a Patron at patreon.com/animalwonders, and if you want to continue to go on adventures with us every week, subscribe to our YouTube channel AnimalWondersMontana and we'll see you next week.

(Endscreen/Credits)