Hi guys and welcome to CROW. My name is Clint and I'm the Operations Director here at CROW.
I'm going to take you around and show you what what we're all about.
This is our clinic building. Our clinic is where all the animals are treated and kept
during the early stages of treatment as well as their rehabilitation process before they get
moved down to the outer areas of the property. And then we've got our primate nursery which is
where the baby primates for the season come in, the ones that need to be bottle-fed and
hand-raised for a period; after which they'll move from the nursery through to the enclosures
which are in our G block. And then eventually, the next year, they'll move down to our KT block which
is the last phase of the rehabilitation process and is right in the far corner of the property.
Obviously with primates, as well as certain other species, they habituate to people a lot easier
than most other species. And so what we try to do is keep that interaction as minimal as possible.
Having them on the furthest side of the property means that only two people really
get to interact with those animals during the last two years of the rehabilitation process.
Being so well adapted to urban environments mongeese is another species that we see
here at CROW very often. This is a troupe of mongoose that have been moved into the
larger holding enclosures. They've been hand raised and moved into our ICU block
where they are kept to adapt to the outdoor environment, and now they've been moved down
here for the last six months or so. As soon as spring comes and there's plenty of food available
these guys will also be moved off to a protected area somewhere in Kwazulu-Natal
where they'll be released and spend the rest of their lives in the wild where they belong.
Hopefully we don't have any babies during the winter season otherwise we might have to hold
them back for a little bit longer until the babies are old enough to be able to be
released with the parents. Now with mongoose, as well as our primates, we don't have a hard
release process. What we do is we actually set up a hacking cage in the protected area where they're
going to be released and then they'll spend a couple of weeks in that enclosure just adapting
to the new environment. We try to get natural foods from that area to feed them and then once
they've adapted after a couple of weeks, we'll go back to the area and we'll open up the enclosures
and then they'll move off into the wild. This is where we have our mammal enclosure
where we've got some dassies in at the moment. We also have some genets and some bush babies.
Once they've been hand raised or gotten to a point where they can go into the outdoor
areas we move them out. There is heating for them for at night time. We also have our ICU
just to my left which is where our small mammals will go in that intermediate stages of being hand
raised before going outdoors. We've got heat lamps inside there. We've got an outdoor indoor area
which we are busy revamping at the moment. Antelope are first hand raised and bottle-fed when
they need bottle feeding at night just outside our clinic. They come in here for the intermediary
stage where they don't need nightly bottle feeds, after which they graduate into our larger camp
where we keep the antelope for the last few months before being released into the wild.
And then we head through to our aviaries as well as our waterfowl ponds. All of these
enclosures here have got ponds in them so later on we will actually be moving baby crocodiles
into A8 which is right at the back, there is a nice big pond for them. We've got water heating
and everything else needed. So to my right here we've got some of our younger Egyptian geese.
We're just in the larger Egyptian goose enclosure. You can see they've got their greens in there,
their grass shavings that were dropped off for them. These guys also were totally abandoned,
no parents with them, and they are a bit younger so there will be a few more months before they'll
be able to be released back into the wild. These are probably one of the the more common species
that come into CROW. We receive hundreds of them every year. Generally with the Egyptian geese
the adult pairs mate for life so if there is an injured adult we actually have to catch the pair
or if they've got goslings we have to catch the whole family to go through the rehabilitation
program. Also we try to make their lives enriched as much as possible, we'll have garden greens,
some weeds that are non-toxic, weeds that we'll put in here for them to nibble on.
We also take them out daily for walks. We've sectioned off an area around the enclosures here,
we will take them out to walk and they can forage for themselves just to give them
that stimulation. Also, if they don't get the correct diet when they are young when growing up
they can get what we call angel wings which is where the one wing kind of flops down
and unfortunately those animals won't be able to fly so it's very important that they get that
stimulation, that enrichment and a good proper diet. And then just at the end here the final
stage of our rehabilitation program in terms of Egyptian geese; we've got our older Egyptian geese
that have been raised here at CROW and they'll be released in the next week to two weeks.
To my left we've got our aviaries for our garden variety birds.
A huge number of animals that we do bring in every year, about 40 to 50 percent, can end
up being garden variety birds. These are at the next stage. Once they've been hand raised, and
have been acclimatized to the outdoor areas they get moved out here for the last phase of their
rehabilitation program. I know we've got some barbets in this enclosure as well as a hornbill
in the enclosure off to the end; and right at the back there we've got a seagull at the moment
that's going through the rehabilitation program. Then just to my right over here we've got our
hadeda enclosures. Another animal where we receive a huge number of this particular species. Hadedas
count for quite a large number of animals that come through. The parents do sometimes tend to be
quite clumsy when building their nests. They build it out of all sorts of bits and pieces including
the rubbish; please, please don't litter. They end up falling out of their nests. We get a lot of
hadadas that have fallen out of their nests. We have to hand raise and get them to the point
where they can be released back into the wild, as well as a large number of hadedas that have
been attacked by dogs. Unfortunately, they do get caught quite often by dogs. I don't
know if it's that call that they make, but dogs don't seem to enjoy hadedas that well.