Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Animals in Alaska

First stop on the tour of animals in Alaska was the musk ox farm which happens to be located right in Palmer where John's mom and step dad live. It was a little rainy but the musk ox didn't seem to mind :)
The farm is a domestication project so they let the visitors feed the musk ox. Its funny because we were just feeding them grass which of course is everywhere but they enjoyed being hand fed.
We even got to feed the babies. Each year they name the calves with a theme, this year's theme was cities and there happened to be a calf named Little Rock! How funny to be in Alaska and feeding a baby musk ox named Little Rock :)
Next on the tour of animals was the reindeer farm which was so much fun! We started by just driving past it on our way to climbing the butte near by. The girl portion of our party got tired halfway up the butte and decided to go back to the reindeer farm while the boys climbed on, definitely a good choice on our part :)
As you can see we got to feed the reindeer. They are so used to being fed that they swarm you and will try and keep you from feeding other reindeer. The farm even tells people to signal with their hands up so that the reindeer know you're out of food!
The reindeer farm also had elk and moose that we fed.
Dolly the bison was the only one we didn't feed but she didn't mind because she liked to have her back scratched :)
Just so I don't leave the boys out, here's a picture from the top of the butte they hiked. You can see tiny specs on the bottom left side, those are the reindeer!
John decided that seeing all those animals didn't count as wildlife because they were in pens. He was holding out to see a moose in the wild but no such luck. We did see wild salmon when we went fishing but that's another story :)


***I almost forgot that Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs did an episode at the reindeer farm, you can view clips here.

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