Mom's Menagerie, Pet Sitting

09/01/2025

I’m sorry to say - the time has come for me to take a break. If you need to reach me, reach out to Jo Ann Russell on fb. Thank you everyone! 💝

09/01/2025

❤️❤️❤️

What fun!

09/01/2025

Wow! That’s a huge talon!

An eagles foot, WOW

09/01/2025

This is absolutely true for all pets

08/28/2025

Platypus- here’s some interesting facts.

This little duck-billed platypus will grow up to be the only venomous egg-laying mammal on the planet.

The duck-billed platypus is one of the most fascinating and unique creatures on Earth a true evolutionary marvel. Native to eastern Australia and Tasmania, this semi-aquatic mammal looks like a mashup of several animals: it has the bill of a duck, the tail of a beaver, the webbed feet of an otter, and it lays eggs like a reptile, yet it's undeniably a mammal.

Belonging to a rare group called monotremes (egg-laying mammals), the platypus is one of only five surviving species in this group the others being echidnas. Female platypuses lay one to three leathery eggs and keep them warm by curling around them until they hatch. Once born, the mother nurses her young, but here's another twist: she doesn't have n!pples. Instead, milk is secreted through pores in the skin and pools on grooves in her abdomen for the babies to lap up.

The platypus's duck-like bill isn't just for show it's a highly sensitive organ packed with electroreceptors, allowing the animal to detect the electric fields of prey underwater, such as insects, larvae, small crustaceans, and worms. This sensory ability is so advanced that the platypus hunts with its eyes, ears, and nostrils closed, relying entirely on this sixth sense while diving.

Despite its adorable appearance, the male platypus has a venomous spur on its hind legs.
During the breeding season, this spur can deliver a painful, though non-lethal, sting to rivals or threats a rare trait among mammals.

Measuring about 30-45 cm (12-18 inches) in body length, with a flat, paddle-like tail, and weighing between 1 to 2.5 kg (2-5.5 lbs), the platypus is perfectly adapted to its aquatic lifestyle. It spends much of its time in freshwater rivers, streams, and lakes, where it swims gracefully using its front webbed feet and steers with the back ones.

Currently, the duck-billed platypus is listed as Near Threatened, primarily due to habitat loss, water pollution, and the impacts of climate change. Conservation efforts are underway to protect its river ecosystems and ensure this bizarre and beloved animal continues to thrive.

In every way, the platypus challenges what we think we know about mammals it's weird, wonderful, and wonderfully weird. 💯💭😬

[Credit: Animal World]

08/28/2025

True

08/24/2025

Cremello horses

A cremello horse is a rare, "double diluted" equine with a cream-colored coat, pink skin, and blue eyes, caused by a chestnut base coat and two copies of the cream gene. They have white or cream manes and tails and are sometimes mistaken for albinos, but they are not.

08/23/2025

Did you know?

💚🐷

08/22/2025

Box turtles ❤️

Very rarely the dogs and I will come across a box turtle as we hunt along hedgerow and field. Today, my neighbor spotted a quite large one moving briskly across our forest floor.

When I was a kid, box turtles were fairly common -- we would find them under the hedges and under the grape arbor at my grandparents place in Kansas -- or in the woods along the river closer to home in Virginia.

Now they are very rare.

The decline of box turtles is largely due to the tremendous rise of roads in the U.S., and the increasing habitat fragmentation these roads have produced.

A turtle's hard shell can withstand examination by a dog, but not the crushing load of a car.

Kids collect a lot of turtles as well. Invariably these animals die in salmonella-soaked aquariums, or else they escape from the confines of a backyard and are run over by a car.

Box turtles live longer than any other wild species in the United States -- 100 years or more is certainly in the cards.

The box turtle is not like the sea turtle or the snapping turtle -- this is an animal that lays only four or five eggs a year, and these eggs -- and whatever young actually hatch out -- must survive the onslaught of raccoon and possums, fox and dogs, disease and the ever-present gauntlet of cars and kids.

Turtles have a high degree of fidelity to relatively small areas, living out their long lives in a few dozen acres of woods. This little patch of woods will supply the box turtle with all the worms, insects, leaves, berries, mushrooms and slugs it needs to survive.

The trouble is that very few other turtle-ranges may overlap this little patch of woods. The result is that if even a single male or female box turtle is removed from a parcel of woods, that loss may effectively kill off all reproductive capacity of other turtles in the area.

Unfortunately, transporting a turtle to a new patch of woods generally dooms it. Turtles may not be brilliant animals, but they are dogged, and if moved to a new patch of woods they will spend years wandering about fruitlessly looking for their ancestral homes. The long-distance excursions these animals invariably take result in turtles crossing roads and being killed by oncoming traffic.

The bottom line: if you know of a child that has removed a box turtle from forest or farm, find out exactly where the turtle was collected, and release it back to the wild in the same location.

The precipitous decline of box turtles in the United States was finally recognized in the early 1990s, and in 1995 all U.S box turtles were formally protected from collection and trade under the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES).

CITES does not save turtles from cars or kids, however -- only education can do that. If you have kids or have access to a classroom of kids, please pass on the fact that box turtles are an endangered species and should NEVER be collected from the wild or transported out of the woods of their birth.

The box turtle is a tough animal, but a fragile species. For those of us who grew up playing in the woods, it is an icon of our youth -- a great treasure found rummaging through the leaves.

Like so much of what we treasure about this great country, however, it is on the verge of being destroyed by human population growth and the development that such population growth invariably engenders.