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News for the month of March 2004

"Babies , Babies, Babies & White Tiger is NOT Hurt"

Well, there is no doubt that March is turning out to be a month of extreme progress and exciting developments. Before I get started giving everyone a quick update on the great Sanctuary news, I want to let everyone know that Tundra our WHITE TIGER is NOT hurt! A few of our visitors have sent us inquiries because they thought her leg was cut. Not to worry, it was just some dirt that looked surprisingly like a cut above her rear, right hip. It washed right off and she is the same frisky 400-pound kitty as she always was.

With that being said, I would like to pass on some additional good news to our readers and viewers. In addition to the three baby Ring-tailed Lemurs born on the 14th, Echo one of the Sanctuary’s adult female Black & White Ruffed lemurs gave birth to twins early in the morning of the 2nd. This is her second year producing healthy infants and we are confident she will take great care of this years infants as she did caring for Oreo last year. Currently, we have Echo and her twins off camera in a separate “Quiet” habitat set up with the appropriate “Nest Box”, nesting materials, bedding warmer, and special diet. In order to help ease lactation and to prevent dehydration, we offer Echo yogurt and Pedialyte. We will try to get a few pictures posted of the babies down the road. Our biggest priority now, is to keep Echo happy, content, and nursing, so we will not disturb her in anyway until her babies gain strength.

March is already starting out intense. Allot of great activity going on here. In addition to adding the 5 baby lemurs we still think there are more pregnant lemurs. We also took over the care of a beautiful 12-year-old male Black & White Ruffed Lemur. This lemur was kept in a ZERO ENRICHMENT CAGE its entire life and is now in “LEMUR HEAVEN”, living in a large habitat surrounded by his own kind. This animal is absolutely beautiful and is extremely valuable genetically. We are pondering introducing Oreo to him down the road?

As if this was not enough, we are in the progress of constructing a new large naturalistic habitat for Sampson (the Sanctuary’s male leopard). Like I have said in many previous Sanctuary Chronicles, we care for ALLOT of animals not currently on our Web-cams. In addition to our desire to constantly upgrade habitats, David and I want to educate the public on the additional species of wildlife we care for not on cam. I am sure with the help and support of our viewers, we will not only be able to upgrade habitats, but we will be able to add new web-cams to both new and old habitats. In a way, we all rely on each other. We need your help and support to maintain the Sanctuary and further our educational goals; and you need us to feed your insensible appetite for knowledge. The more we receive in help from our visitors, the more cams we can add, the more topics we can cover in our “Educational Center”, the better the technology we can incorporate to bring you faster cams, and most importantly the better we can improve the lives of our residents. Another thing to keep in mind when considering a donation to help us with our goals is to consider the fact that we are reaching a “Global” audience. We are actually in some cases reaching viewers that are directly related to the ongoing survival of endangered species in their area from all over the world. We need to instill an interest in the protection and conservation of both the wild animals and the remaining wild places in which they inhabit. There is no better way to do that then the education of the indigenous people sharing the endangered animals environment. As you can imagine, most endangered animals share territory with impoverished or very poor native peoples. It is up to us that are more fortunate to help out. The ability for the mission and goals of the www.tigerhomes.org website to reach and educate people on a global level is one of our favorite concept about the Internet!

March also signifies the activation and launching of some website changes and “Page Optimizations”. I am sure some of you have noticed that you have to “LOG ON”. This allows viewers to upload their “Snap Shots” taken via our Web Cams to our new “Gallery”. Each viewer is aloud to upload a few photos each month to the “Gallery”. The entire Sanctuary team is very excited about this because some of the “Snap Shot” pictures sent us are truly remarkable and need to be shared. We have viewers so into capturing that perfect “behavioral moment”, that we are told they already have over 1800 pictures taken via the snapshot feature. So when I say there are some spectacular “Snap Shots”, I mean it!

David, Donnie, Alex, Cathy (our biggest fan) and myself, all feel confident that 2004 is going to bring about some great progress. We are all so happy to share the remarkable lives of these amazing creatures with you. Nothing gives us more pride then the quality of our environments and care we provide the animals with the small exception to being able to instill an interest in their protection in the eyes of our supporters. Until next month, “Keep On Watching And Learning”, J.