Thursdays with Inuk, part two

A couple pictures of me with my buddy, Inuk. I am still doing whale enrichment on Thursday mornings at the aquarium and can not imagine giving it up. As if the whales weren't cool enough, I have the best partner, Marliese. She and I have a blast playing with these guys - plus, she takes the best pictures!

Thursdays with Inuk

This is what I do on Thursday mornings before I go to work. I play with three Beluga whales, including Inuk, the curious guy in the background there - and give them plenty of fish and tongue rubs (yes, belugas like their tongues rubbed). Sticking your hand in a whale's mouth may not be your idea of the right way to start the day, but it rates pretty high on my list.

Animal Planet

Volunteering at the Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration definitely has its perks. Yes, I have to do some sort of disgusting stuff, like clean the skimmers and handle raw fish (really, the fish part is not that gross - at least, not to me). However, when I am not prepping their food, I get to hang out with these guys:

Coco, our biggest and oldest California sea lion. He weighs about 800 pounds right now and he is over 20 years old;

Surfer, our teenage sea lion. I secretly think Surfer is our best-looking boy in the marine theater;

Hut/Boomerang,our youngest and most playful. Hut is about two and a half and he is a handful sometimes. He loves to play with the toys we make him out of old kitty litter bins, PVC, etc.

The sea lions have always been my favorites, and I knew when I started volunteering as a docent that I eventually wanted to volunteer on a sea lion exhibit. And I have no intention of ever giving up my post unless I absolutely have to.

But recently, I have been introduced to a new experience at the aquarium: beluga whales.

Belugas are new to me - the volunteer spots on that exhibit are extremely hard to get, and I didn't think I was particularly interested. But the more time I spent watching the belugas, the more I knew I wanted to see them up close. Luckily for me, I got my chance when the aquarium let the volunteers do a beluga contact session in preparation for the program they open to the public.

In the water with the trainer and our beluga

Noe and I got to put on waders and get in the water with a beluga and a trainer. The trainer showed us different behaviors they train with the whales and gave us the opportunity to do some hand signals with them. We got to touch the whales as well. We were literally less than a foot away from our whale the whole time.

Noe and I in our waders

Asking the beluga for a "high target"

As an added bonus, we were with one of the trainers from Shedd aquarium in Chicago (Shedd has their belugas and dolphins in Mystic while the renovate their exhibit) and our whale is the mother of a calf, who kept poking his little head out of the water to see what was going on. Baby belugas are probably one of the cutest sights on the planet:

Miki, our baby beluga:
the babies are born gray and lighten up as they get older

I liked the belugas so much that when a spot recently opened on our whale enrichment team at the aquarium, I interviewed for it. The whale enrichment team is a team of volunteers who essentially play with the whales every day for an hour. We take different shifts one day a week. So once a week, I will be going to the aquarium before work and making sure our whales get their intellectual stimulation for the day in the form of PVC toys, bubbles, feeder balls, musical instruments, etc. I went for the first time this week and I loved it. It is definitely worth getting up that extra hour early.

The aquarium has a new docent class starting up soon; you can fill out an application at the volunteer section of their website. If you're in the area, I urge you to check it out!

Boston State of Mind

Although Noe and I are about equal distance from Boston and New York City (maybe even a little closer to Boston) we find ourselves in New York much more often. This is mostly due to the great museum perk Noe gets for working for big pharma (and my overwhelming desire to see a giant Christmas tree).

This past weekend, however, we were handed a great excuse to head in the opposite direction. My good friend Sophie was in Boston visiting her sister, a grad student at BU. Noe and I both wanted to see Soph, and we both wanted to explore Boston, and to top it all off the weather forecast was calling for absolutely incredible - if slightly warmer than usual - fall weather. We didn't think too long about it. Noe picked me up from the aquarium on Saturday afternoon, we grabbed some lunch, and away we went.

Beantown as seen from Long Wharf

We were able to catch up with Sophie and her family on Saturday night for dinner in the North End, Boston's Italian enclave. Basically, since there were six of us wandering around without a reservation, we meandered down the street until we found a restaurant that could accommodate our party. Most of the restaurants are small Italian joints within a variety of price ranges. Figuring any of these places were bound to be decent, we weren't too picky. Eventually we ended up at G'vanni's, mainly because they were able to seat our party within ten minutes. We were not disappointed.

Soph and I both ordered pumpkin ravioli in a burnt butter and sage sauce. It sounded like fall, and when it arrived the aroma of sage almost knocked me out of my chair. Although the smell was strong, the sage was not overpowering. The light butter sauce let the sweet-ish flavor of the pumpkin come through. Noe's pasta carbonara was also good - the cream sauce had a good consistency and was neither too bland or overpoweringly cheesy.

(I did not drink any wine at this meal - I know, weird for me, isn't it? But I was not with my wine drinking crew - no one else was drinking - and truthfully, I was pretty ravenous by the time we sat down to eat, so I wasn't even thinking about it.)

Saturday morning Noe and I hauled ourselves our of bed and back downtown (we were staying on the outskirts; hotel rooms in Boston are pretty pricey) and out to Long Wharf to go whale watching. Yes, I know this is a touristy thing to do, but I have never seen a whale other than our aquarium belugas and I wanted to see these huge animals out in the open ocean.

On the boat, looking for whales

Once again, not disappointed. Boston Harbor Cruises took us out to Stellwagen on a high-speed catamaran, and we saw dozens of whales. None of them breached (beaching is when they come completely out of the water) but we saw many of them come partially out, including a mother and her calf. We saw humpbacks, finbacks, and minkes. These animals are amazing. It helped too that we had insanely gorgeous weather - a great day for a cruise on a boat.

One of the first whales we saw -
it is hard to get good pics of them without a good camera

Once we were back on dry land, Sophie met us at Fanueil Hall/Quincy Market, where we grabbed some lunch, then it was back to the North End. Noe and I had decided we couldn't let another Boston trip go by without a visit to Mike's Pastry, and everything Sophie's family told us about their own visit just whetted our appetites more. After all, as far as desserts go, there is nothing I like more than good cannoli.

Noe with our glorious box of cannoli from Mike's Pastry

We joined the throngs of tourists in the long, long line (which moved very quickly, considering) and were soon out the door and sitting across the street from Paul Revere's house indulging in some truly decadent desserts. Mike's cannoli deserve its stellar reputation. I ordered the ricotta filled with chocolate chips, and Noe ordered the chocolate mousse filled with chocolate chips. Both the sweet ricotta cream and the airy, fluffy mousse tasted much lighter than any cannoli has a right to taste, and the crispy, freshly made shells provided a satisfying crunch. The chocolate chip-dipped ends and the dusting of confectioner's sugar were the perfect amount of sugary sweetness. I would weigh 300 pounds if I lived near Mike's Pastry.

Soph and I in across from Paul Revere's house

We walked ourselves out of our dessert coma by following the Freedom Trail a bit and wandering around one of the old cemeteries, then it was time for Soph to rejoin her family and Noe and I to head back to CT. But I hope we'll be heading back to Boston very soon.

RIP Baby Whale

The poor Australian baby whale was euthanized today. Read the story here: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iZPap4fq9dXbvAYF6fNSAXUFot7AD92NFCSG0


Just to be clear, while I think this story is incredibly sad, I am in general agreement with the wildlife experts. Cestacians are extremely difficult to rehabilitate and they had no way of re-creating the mother's milk that this whale would have needed. I am upset about it because it is sad, NOT because I disagree with how these events played out.

Are You My Mother?

Does anyone else remember the children's book Are You My Mother? it's about a baby bird trying to find it's mother. Along the way it questions other animals and even some pieces of machinery.

This kind of reminds me of that book:



Poor baby whale. I hope it turns out OK.