Tessa Stripes is our newest animal keeper here at Carolina Tiger Rescue. She studied wildlife biology at Virginia Tech. Before coming to Carolina Tiger Rescue, she interned at Wildlife Safari. Her favorite animals to work with are tigers! She enjoys giving the animals at Carolina Tiger Rescue a safe and appropriate home for them. It’s a hard and dirty job, but she loves it! Her favorite time of year at the rescue is the fall, when all the animals get pumpkins for enrichment!
Keeper Tessa’s Blog 10/3/19
Mila and Riley Tiger have been moved back into their enclosure in Pine Forest!
In September, the girls were moved from their enclosure so work could be done to it. They spent about a month in Karen’s Keep, our quarantine building. While there, they enjoyed chasing each other in the new outdoor section of quarantine, swimming in their pool, and receiving their first pumpkin enrichment! You can see Mila play with her pumpkin in quarantine on our videos page. The work on their enclosure was recently completed so we transported them back to their home next to Shira Tiger.
The girls are happy to be in their usual territory again. Both tigers continue to chase each other around their shifts and have been taking in the cool fall weather. They even got more pumpkin enrichment! When we have multiple animals living in an enclosure, we will give them enough enrichment to each have their own, so the girls received two pumpkins. Mila loved her pumpkin. She laid down and rolled with it, taking in the perfume we sprayed. Here she is digging her claws into it!
Another exciting day for Mila and Riley is coming up – their birthday! They will be five years old on the first of November, so I need to come up with some special enrichment for that day. Excuse me while I get back to work on that. What would you give Mila and Riley as birthday enrichment?