Signed Off

This week was my first real week at Living Coast where I was able to do things on my own. Last week I was busy getting signed off on the various aspects, so now I was able to prove that I had learned everything.

So my day started by cleaning all of the raptor enclosures. This means I shut myself inside and sprayed down any urites (bird feces) that I found. I then pour out their water dishes, scrub it down to make sure there is no algae, urites, or bugs within them, and then refill them with fresh water. As an added measure, whenever I was in an enclosure I also gave the birds a spray down. This is when we put the hose on a very low spray and wet the birds down. We did this because there was a heat advisory all week, having temperatures almost reaching 100 each day, so giving them spray downs helped keep them cool. Birds cannot sweat, like most animals, and therefore they pant. Spraying them down helped minimize that as it cooled their bodies down and they would drink some of the water that hit their beaks.

Once this was done I prepared diets for the raptures and the shorebirds, weighing out in grams the amount of rats, quail, chicks, mice, or fish (capelin, herring, smelt, and silversides) for each individual bird. Once we finished that I had extra time and got to socialize Poe, she is a crow we recently acquired from someone who thought they could keep her as a pet, but quickly realized that a wild animal is not suited to be a pet. However, since she was kept as a pet for a while she had been imprinted on, therefore making her unafraid of people and unreleasable to to the wild. Due to this, we are trying to socialize her so we can use her as an ambassador to educate people on how it is unwise, safe, or fair to keep wild animals as pets. To socialize her at this point, we simply sit within her enclosure with her for an extended amount of time, handing her feathers and various little toys she finds interesting. By finding things that interest her, we gave her a reason to come closer to us, therefore getting use to our close proximity.

The afternoon was pretty standard, cleaning various enclosures and feeding out diets. This week was a lot of learning, and I have learned a lot. I am excited to start handling the raptors in the next few weeks!