pigeons and a baby seal!

Today I was on birds (everything but seals) all day. Me and another intern named Crissy fed the birds before we went out to collect browse for the fawns (we mainly get ocean spray because that's what they seem to like best). I also had fun picking and eating some of the blackberries that can be found all over the place. :) Oh, and when we went out we also got to release the crossbill!! That was neat, I have a pick of me and it that I'll put up later when I get it off of Crissy (as I still don't have my camera battery). We got a canadian goose in the other day that is really emaciated, we think she has worms. Poor thing keeps throwing up when we tube feed her, but I think she's getting a little better.

For lunch the center bought sandwich supplies and we all ate sandwiches together, that was nice. Later on I was sent out to take the ferry from Vesuvius Bay to Crofton (a 20 min ferry ride) to pick up two pigeons. The other day I did the same thing and picked up a Cedar Waxwing that had a bum leg.

At the end of the day I went with the vet, Marielle (she's French), and another intern (from Germany), Anne-Marie, and we picked up a baby seal from some people that brought it from another island in their sail boat. It is of course so cute!! Poor thing is really skinny (about 17 lbs when at that age they're supposed to be about 30-40 lbs), and she is missing her left eye (it's all pussy) as well as has bites all over her fins. Marielle let me name her (the name theme is type fonts) and so as she's a girl I named her Aquilina. :)

Other than all of that I just made food dishes for animals, fed them, cleaned, did some laundry, etc. I don't actually start on seals until Sunday, but I am really looking forward to it! :)

Island Wildlife Rescue Centre

I have just arrived at the Island Wildlife Rescue Centre on Salt Spring Island, BC Canada! David, his dad John, and I all got up at 5:30 AM to head out and catch the ferry at 10:20 at Tsawwaasen (essentially Vancouver). We left some extra time for getting through Seattle traffic as well as crossing the boarder, but ended up having an extra hour at the ferry docks. We ate a little then walked around near the water and while making our way back to the van we heard a call that it was our rows turn to go so we ran. Luckily there was one car parked in front of us who's people hadn't gotten back yet so we didn't feel so bad. :P The ferry ride was about 3 hours because Salt Spring was the 4th stop out of 5. We talked a lot, looked at the scenery as well as had a bite to eat. It was really awesome, we saw two different pods of orcas!!!! That was my first whale sighting!! How awesome!! Later we also saw a sea otter, we barely saw him cause just his head was above water, but boy was he cute. :P

The centre is really neat, very beautiful! I will take some pics when I get my camera battery back. David and I went to Idaho on a camping trip to visit some of our friends from Moscow who live in Idaho City. We had a blast, but I accidentally left my camera battery in it's charger plugged into the wall, so one of my friends is sending it to me. :) One of the bosses here, named Yoch (a woman in maybe her 40's) showed me around a bit today. She's really kind of odd, but I like her a lot. :) She is a bit of a gypsy (she said so herself). She was an intern here last year and now she's on staff. :) She also spent some time in China, so I'll have to talk to her about it more as David and I want to go teach English there for a bit. :) Anyway, I should finish getting unpacked and such. I'll write again soon when I get the chance, it seems that I'll be fairly busy here. I have tomorrow off to get settled in a bit but will also be learning about birds. It's kind of sad they had two eagle chicks that they just released into the wild yesterday, so I just missed it. :( Oh well, :P There aren't any more raptors at the moment, but they have:
pigeons, squirrels, fawns, raccoons, a robin, starling (and two other such birds), a pelican (they plan on releasing her soon), 3 seagulls, and of course lots of seals. :) They are sooooo cute!!!!

Love of the Land Rendezvous

July 24-26 was the Love of the Land Rendezvous, which, among other things, included a pow wow. Arjun and I walked over to the Little Feather Indian Center where we got a "famous" indian taco, very yummy! :) We'd never been in that building before, it's run by a woman from England and a man from The Netherlands. :) They were very nice people. After we got our tacos we went over to the pow wow for a while, I had to run home cause I forgot to grab my camera. After I came back I made sure to take a pic of the dead kingfisher that I saw on the road. Of course after that I got a few pow wow pics, but by then most of the really neat dances were over.

After that I went over to the Song of the Hiawatha Pageant grounds were they had a black powder shoot and booths. The people there were really neat. I got some tips about tanning our own deer hide by one guy, but he mainly said never do it! :P I was thinking since we were going hunting again this fall, it would be kind of neat to try it out and make something of the hide, but it takes too long soaking in lye etc, that I wouldn't be able to do it. One guy let me try the atlattle and I kicked Arjun's butt!! :P Haha, no, he did pretty good too. That same guy showed us his bow and his old style gun (I don't remember caliber etc) that he uses to hunt with. One thing that I thought was interesting (as I've only ever really seen it done in movies) is he said that you never poor gun powder directly from your horn into the gun cause if there's a hot bit and it sparks you're holding a bomb in your hand. If you're in battle that's another thing though as you don't have as much time. Also, there is a different kind of (finer) powder as the charge as there is inside the gun. :) I also got to try my hand with throwing a hatchet, I did quite well! It's actually not that hard really, I didn't realize it has so much to do with where you stand! It makes sense though. If you hit with the back of it then you're too close cause it didn't get enough time to make a full rotation. Also, you can start off throwing it with the blade pointing backwards, but then you have to stand further back, as it makes one and a half rotations and hits your target upside-down. Here's a pic of a guy doing it.

Well, we're almost done at work here. We just have to take vegetation samples at each nest site (we have 14 to do). We were going to do that today, but it's raining, so Arjun is going some data entry since he needs to make up more time than I do. We found out the the turkey nest we've been watching has hatched! Sadly though, the mallard nest we found got eaten. :( Oh well, such is life. One day just after I got done with the rest of my point counts and got into the truck, a red-headed woodpecker perched on the fence right in front of the truck! It was so pretty!! I was trying to slowly reach for my camera but it flew a few posts down before I got it out. So, you can still see it in this pic, but it was a lot closer before.

Also, I got to go into my very first corn field!! Haha, after seeing Forest Gump when I was young I always wanted to go into one, and the corn here is now some of the tallest it's ever been says a local farmer. :) Today I also spent some time taking pics around the interpretive center for your interest. :) I will put them up on another post.

pics of what we do!

Here are some pics of mist netting, rope dragging, and vegetation sampling, just in case you were curious. :)

Little bits

This is going to be a bit of a ramble about some of the little things that have been going on. For one thing, Arjun and I are back in action doing point counts and vegetation sampling, which we should be done with by Sunday. Sarah should be coming early to mid next week to help us close things out, and we should be wrapping up on July 31! Arjun and I have been working 6 days a week for a bit to help get caught up on time that we've lost due to weather etc... so I am starting to get a bit drained out. I shouldn't really complain, it's not like it's a tough job, but I think that not going to bed quite early enough and getting up at 5 AM every morning wears on you a bit.

Arjun and I found a mallard nest in the field today, she flushed while we were doing vegetation sampling. :P The nest smelled just like Julie (my pet duck), I miss her so much. There are 8 eggs. We have been keeping a close eye on all of the nests that we've found, which lately have been quite a few! The Eastern Kingbird chicks look like they'll fledge soon! Here's a pic of them from yesterday, these are the same ones that I put a pic up of last time, you can see how much they've grown!


Also, once while I was walking on the path, there were two little voles just sitting on the path!! They were so cute, and they didn't move even when I got super close! I even touched one before it moved, and even then it just slowly sauntered away. :P


One bad thing that happened is that Arjun lost his range finder, which neither of us can imagine where it went!! We had it for the last point we did veg sampling at a few days ago, which is really close to the parking lot, and then we walked directly back to the truck. I wouldn't make sense for him to have taken it off before we got to the truck, but it's not there, it's not in our apartments, it's not in our backpacks! I hope that it turns up while we're packing up, cause even though we can get on without it ok (as I have mine, it just means that we have to take turns doing point counts instead of doing them simultaneously) they are a bit pricy, even if they aren't the highest quality, and I don't want Sarah to have that loss. I don't blame Arjun at all, we've all had that happen to us before, and we can't give any explanation of where it went.

Another bit of news is that on Tuesday the 21st we did a little presentation on grassland birds and the project we're doing for the interpretive center. They have scheduled different little presentations every Tuesday for the next few months, and we were the opening act. ;P It went really well, we had a bigger turn out than we expected too, with about 9 people. :) We talked about what grassland birds are, their morphology and how that helps them in their environment, our target species, and about nests. Afterwards we went outside and showed them a Field Sparrow nest that had been abandoned earlier in the season that still has an egg in it. We also took them over to see the Red-Winged Black Bird that is very temperamental about people being around his nest (which is a bit strange as the rest of the RWBL males aren't that aggressive). He actually wasn't very upset this time around. :) Alternatively, here's a pic of him attacking Arjun. :P


I suppose there's not too much else to talk about at the moment, just that we only have one week left, which is really hard to believe!! It's been a good job and I am very glad and feel privileged that I was able to do it! I am, however, very ready and excited to be going home and seeing David again! :) Yay!! I am also excited for camping!! Yay!! I will be flying out of Omaha on Aug 4th, but will be leaving Pipestone (driving the University pick-up down and it will be picked up by grad students) on Aug 2nd. I am going to be staying with Zach and Amber Niebaum, some family friends of ours that I haven't seen in ages! It should be really nice to see them again. Well, that's all for now, I'm sure I'll probably write again at least once more before I leave, then there'll be a bit of a hiatus before I start my next internship Aug 25th. :)

pictures!

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Eastern Kingbird


Red-Wing Black Bird nest

Eastern Kingbird chicks

Nests

Mom to baby kingbirds in post entitled "pictures"

To find nests Arjun and I mainly would rope drag the fields of the park... this was fairly unproductive. When you rope drag you are trying to flush females off of the nest so you can search where she left and hopefully find it! This happened only occasionally while we were rope dragging. Recently, because of extremely strong winds (we think it's kind of counterproductive that if the wind is blowing the grass over, and this is what you do rope dragging, that it won't make a difference) we've been doing a lot of just nest searching. We've been going through the areas that have denser vegetation that can't be rope dragged. On Tuesday this yielded us 3 nests and we also found a turkey nest while we were mist netting that morning. Yesterday it yielded another 3 nests! We actually found 4, but one is in a tree, so it doesn't count (only doing grassland birds). We are very excited, our goal was to get at least as many as the interns from last year (hopefully more) and they had 15... we now have 19!! I think we will definitely find more before the end too, so that's really good!

Today we started point counts and vegetation sampling again (as we need to do each twice in our time here, so this is the second time around). It's a really good thing we're doing it again cause we can really notice the differences in occurrences of birds as well as the growth of vegetation! There are heaps of birds we don't see much of now that used to be all over (grackles), and we are seeing a lot more of other birds. And of course the vegetation has changed dramatically!

Each morning when we go out there is heaps of dew on the grass, so we get quite wet walking through it. Dad was wonderful enough to buy me a nice pair of gortex boots before I came out here, so my feet could stay dry... well, they are very waterproof for sure but there's a different problem. My pants become so wet while walking through the grass that water drips down my legs and soaks my socks!! Today was especially bad, I was walking around in my own little puddles. I always bring my mesh tennis shoes with me for later in the day because usually it's cool and wet in the morning and then really hot and dry later on and the boots get too hot, well, today I had to change early cause it was like I was walking around with two buckets of water on my feet! I should have brought dad's lower leg gators with me! Anyway, it's not that bad, just annoying really.

We have been seeing more and more baby birds about now too! Today I flushed a female pheasant and about a foot away were at least 4 chicks, they were so cute! We've been finding quite a few Red-Wing Black Bird nests (they are easy to find cause they choose a certain grass/shrub to nest in, usually around water, and chirp at you when you get too close then the female flushes right off of the nest). There is one nest near the pond along the trail and the male RWBL was so mad at me for being there that he was just a few inches above my head swooping me a lot, which for them isn't very normal, all of the others have kept a distance! Just after I found that nest I went to look in some bushes just for the heck of it, and when I was walking through a large patch of bush, I brushed away some leaves and saw the tinniest patch of pin feathers, and there was one huge baby in a nest!! I couldn't believe it!! Out of that whole big patch of bushes the nest was RIGHT next to where I stepped... and really well hidden too! What luck.

baby bird I found... it is possibly a Brown-Headed Cow Bird chick in a Clay Colored Sparrow nest (they are nest parasites)