Pictures!

Half way through Week 2. Life is definitely starting to fall into more of a routine, although each day is always something new. In many ways, it’s the perfect balance for a job: your knowledge and routines are similar each day (although they probably improve daily) but you never quite know what may walk through the door next, so there’s always an element of surprise and novelty. Even the staff who have been at the center for years never seem mindlessly bored. I’ve gotten a chance to learn a bit about some of their backgrounds and discovered that basically every single one of them previously came from a job either in finance/marketing of some sort, or computer stuff. They all hated their jobs and realized that their passions lay with working with animals and now they can’t imagine doing anything else. It’s inspiring to hear, as it is likely that they were receiving significantly higher salaries and benefits than they are now at the center, but they think the sacrifice is worth it to be doing what they love.

Okay, details: Wednesday I helped open the BCU again at 7AM along with two other interns (one just arrived for session 3 – now that we’ve all arrived it looks like there’s only going to be 4 interns for the 3^rd session, and it’s going to feel pretty empty once the big group all leaves. My roommate leaves at the end of July, and two of the others are leaving two weeks before that. On that note, it’s hard to believe how fast the summer is flying! We’re almost to July – yikes!) BCU gets pretty repetitive and you can kind of get into a groove as you work, following the schedule set by the timers. There was one adorable little mockingbird in one of the boxes when I arrived, whose chart noted that he had developed a slight head tilt recently. Indeed his head appeared to be cocked to one side every time I lifted the net over the box to feed him and his companion, and sadly it continued to grow more severe as the day wore on, until he was practically standing on his head by the end of the day. One of the staff members took a look and determined that it was probably a neurological problem (possibly developed from crashing into a window, possibly prior to his arrival to the center or if he happened to have escaped one day and crashed into the glass windows around the BCU). It didn’t seem like anything could be done, so we ended up putting him to sleep. Euthanasia is a real and sad part of life at the center, but often has to happen. Many of the animals are brought in after dog/cat attacks, or have been hit by cars for example, and there’s really nothing we can do to help them at that point, as their injuries are simply too severe. Furthermore, if they happened to survived the rehabilitation process, which could be long and painful, they may potentially never achieve the same physical fitness they had before their injury, and it could negatively impact their chances of survival, which would just cause more suffering. As sad as that outcome is, it is balanced out by the feeling of happiness and excitement when you successfully do help save a creature’s life and can watch it recover to the point where it can be set free.

Along with the new intern, we also had a group of new volunteers helping in the BCU and I was placed in the strange position of being one of the “experts,” which I definitely feel is a far from true assessment. I still feel completely overwhelmed by all the new tasks I’m faced with every day, and still have a long list of things to learn. What’s comforting is to know that in reality I’ll never stop learning – the interns who have been here already for weeks are still learning new things each day, and everyone is super helpful and more than willing to explain or show you how to do something if you ask or feel uncomfortable. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m getting exposed to a lot of veterinary techniques/skills, such as doing complete physicals (at some point I’ll supposedly become completely competent in doing this unsupervised), doing limb wraps, medication injections, checking for breaks and lacerations and cleaning wounds. All while also mastering a expertise of California wildlife and being able to recognize different species on sight, even as indefinable baby lumps of feathers. I’m hoping that one day I’ll be able to help with a release and see one of these animals head back into the wilderness, because I’ve heard that there is no better feeling of satisfaction.  

On a somewhat happier note, I’m finally getting a chance to experience life in Cali! On Tuesday, my roommate and I both had days off so we drove down to Santa Monica and walked down the pier and at the outdoor mall (where I bought a GRE textbook – blehhh) and had lunch at the great Caribbean place that I visited with Kmo, Graham and Jeff last week. Later that night, we went out with some of the other interns to a nearby British Pub that featured a trivia night, and surprising to say, we didn’t do that bad. J And I finally got a chance to go to the beach a little bit yesterday afternoon – hoping this will happen more!

Until next time, Peace, love and fuzzy animals! 

(sorry this post wasn’t as action-packed and interesting) Maybe some pictures below will make up for it. 

Pictures of the guest house where I'm staying - so you put some context to these stories! 

 

Ferruginous hawk

Baby hummingbirds (notice the small syringes for size context)

Baby finches

We passed a Tesla store at the mall....

....naturally we had to try it out! 

View from one of my afternoon runs

Pearl, the white raven (Super friendly and going to be used as an education animal)

Birds, Ducklings and Camels, Oh My!

Hey all! As the end of my first week winds up, I thought I'd provide an update on the rest of my first crazy week at CWC! (I thought I'd also introduce the abbreviations I will probably be dropping frequently in my posts, so now you readers will have this post to refer back to).

Wednesday: when I arrived at the center at 7AM for my first official day, it was to find that there was no one around. I dropped my stuff in the staff lounge/office area and then attempted to get into the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) and BCU (Baby Care Unit) buildings. The ICU was where I was working my first day, and is where all new intake patients (that are not baby birds) are brought to be checked out and evaluated.

After wandering around like a lost puppy for about fifteen minutes, another intern popped her head out of the BCU and invited me inside. She introduced me to the world of Baby Care, a room filled with small boxes and mesh cages, containing about 30 baby birds of varying species. (see the pic below) At different times of the year the BCU is also home to baby squirrels, but apparently baby squirrel season ended just before I got there. The people with the morning shift are responsible for the BCU (and I guess the rest of the center) until the rest of the staff arrive. All of the baby birds are divided up based on how frequently they need to be fed. There are some (usually the youngest) that have to be fed every 30 mins, some every 45, others every hour and then 1 1/2 hours and 2 hours. The first task in the morning once we arrive is to feed the 30 minute birds and then work our way up the schedule. Feeding technique varies depending on the species - some are fed a special formula, while others are fed small meal worms and other bugs and sometimes cut up fruit. We use small curved forceps and tweezers to feed the baby birds, mimicking how the mother bird would feed them in the wild.

Baby Care Unit! (BCU) The covers are meant to keep the birds from seeing the people moving around. Even if they aren't imprinting, we want them to have some privacy and not get too stressed out. 

When we take the covers off the cages, the baby birds immediately open their mouths and "gape," begging to be fed. (Unlike many of the animals we treat, baby birds don't imprint as easily on humans and so it's not as big of a deal if they see our faces when we feed them. For those who don't know what "imprinting" is, it's when a baby animal starts to believe that a human surrogate is it's parent and grows up thinking humans are friendly and will feed it. This can be beneficial for domestic pets like puppies, but can be problematic for organizations like ours where our goal is to keep the animals as wild as possible). We use timers to keep track of when each group of birds needs to be fed, and things get kinda chaotic if we happen to fall behind schedule and suddenly three different timers are all going off simultaneously! Some of the birds, like the doves, have to be "tube fed," which literally consists of sticking a narrow, plastic tubing down their throat and then attaching the tube to a syringe of formula which we squirt directly into their stomaches. Sounds gross, but apparently it's how their fed by their parents in the wild (obviously sin plastic tubing :P) I spent the entire day walking circles around Baby Care, feeding birds, cleaning cages and helping the staff with other small tasks. I don't think i managed to sit down once and my legs definitely felt the result of that later.

Thursday: Finally got to meet my supervisor Jo - awesomely chill and really helpful (and really smart! She can recognize birds just from texted photos and knows basically everything a vet knows (at least from my humble, uneducated perspective)). In reality there are four staff members (Jo, Jenn, Bruna and Dennis - just in case I refer to someone by name, you now have this post to reference back to), who we interns work under, and one employed veterinarian (who has his own externs working with him). I spent Thursday in BCU again (the interns are supposed to move back and forth between ICU and BCU every day, but depending on how many staff/volunteers are in and how crazy it is with new patients, sometimes we have to do multiple days in one department. Thursday we had a huge number of volunteers show up, so many that it actually caused a bit of a back up in the ICU, since people were trying to work over one another). One of my favorite tasks is definitely feeding the baby hummingbirds. We had three in the BCU that day, and one was so small that he couldn't feed himself from the syringes of sugar water we had placed in their cage. He gaped like the other baby birds and we had to stick a very narrow syringe of hummingbird formula into his throat and squirt about 2 drops into it. They were all so tiny - smaller than ping pong balls!

Friday: Spent all day in the ICU this time. It was a bit more relaxed than the very first day - we didn't have a huge influx of new patients so Jo was able to devote a lot of time to teaching me a lot of important jobs, step by step. This included drawing up formula (called EMS - no idea what it stands for, but it's the usual liquid food that we give to birds that can't feed themselves), preparing medication and documenting it, recording new patient intakes and procedures, and delivering sub Q's, which means rehydrating birds by injecting them with high electrolyte concentrated fluids. I didn't realize how much vet stuff I would be getting a chance to observe, let alone actually assist with, so I'm thrilled - I've been thinking recently that I may want to go into school to become a veterinary technician, although with little to no experience thus far, I'm hoping this summer's experiences will help me at least narrow down my future career orientation. Got to help do intake on a baby Cooper's Hawk, that I also got to hand feed bits of meat (using forceps).

Gross part of the day: never did I anticipate that I would one day be cutting up dead chicks (yes, sadly I'm talking about the fluffy yellow things you see in a barnyard) into bloody chunks to feed to hungry birds of prey. Thankfully the chicks are already dead and have been frozen for a while, which makes it a bit easier to handle, although not much. My approach is to not stop to think about what I'm doing because if i do, i'll never actually be able to finish. I also learned how to skin dead mice (also frozen). I can't decide if it's better or worse that I'm a vegetarian, but i definitely can say that these tasks would put you off meat for a while.

Tube feeding (Jo on the left)

Wonderful surprise when I was handed a big cardboard box and told to prepare a cage for dees wittle guys :)

This weekend I also got the chance to meet up with some fellow camels! Katie Morgan who lives in Pasadena picked me up and I spend two days with her at her beautiful home, along with Graham Nelson and Jeff Carmichael who road tripped to CA to drop Jeff off at grad school in Santa Barbara. We spent Saturday seeing the sights around L.A, including the Griffith Observatory, Rodeo Drive and the Hollywood Hills, plus the excitement of the Pasadena freeways :) It was wonderful to have a taste of home, and I can't wait to see everyone once I'm back!

I was hoping to upload more pictures, but the wifi appears to be dying, so I guess you'll all just have to wait till the next post!

Until then.... peace, love and sunshine!

First (Unofficial) Day

Although today was technically my day off, I thought I'd acquaint myself with the California Wildlife Center, simultaneously getting a chance to explore some of the nearby area. I arrived late last night and the darkness did not allow me to really appreciate the local environment, save for that the road leading up to the house is incredibly windy, bordering on almost frightening, especially in the pitch black :P My roommate was visiting her family today so without a means of motored transportation, I have yet to go out and furnish myself with groceries and other necessities, but I'm hoping to get to see more of Malibu soon!

The center is only about a 10 minute walk down the hill, and then up a shorter one directly across the street (you can hear and smell it almost before you see it). I didn't get a chance to meet my supervisor, Jo Joseph, but there were about a dozen other people running around already, and they wasted no time putting me to work. I barely had explained who I was and my role, before I was told to check in with the kitchen volunteers to see if they needed help preparing diets (meals for the animals). There I met a volunteer who had me help her prepare the morning food (the animals are fed roughly two to three times a day (some are fed every few hours), and the morning and afternoon meals are prepared first thing in the morning). Today, the staff was running a bit behind schedule and by the time I arrived at around 10:30, they were still finishing up the AM meals. So i rolled up my metaphorical sleeves and jumped right in, spending the morning chopping up not just fruits and veggies, but also dead mice, hard boiled eggs, and wet dog food. (Appreciation goes out to Franklin Park Zoo for pre-exposing me to dead, bloody rodents). Within the first couple of hours I was at the center, I found myself assisting one of the vets with the weighing of one of two juvenile Coopers Hawk (for a visual, see below). Then I was assigned the task of cleaning the cage of four baby ducklings, which meant taking them all out one by one and placing them into a temporary plastic holding box, before cleaning out the old, soiled newspaper. For young birds without working wings, they can move fast! I was so worried I was going to hurt them since I had to grab them firmly, lest they squirm away, but they seemed to bounce back pretty quick.

(Not my own pic - courtesy of google images)

The volunteer and I then went and delivered some of the meals, including to some mockingbirds who dive-bombed us when we entered their enclosure, and one overly curious/very hungry squirrel who tried to climb my shirt in his eagerness to get to the food in my hand.

The craziest/smelliest part of the day was when I accompanied another intern to the room that housed the rabies-vector species (RVU - to clarify, these animals did not necessarily have rabies, they were just the species identified to likely contain them and thus, only people with the rabies vaccination were allowed to care for them). This means bats, some raptors and skunks - yes skunks. I got the wonderful opportunity to hold baby skunks, while attempting to avoid getting sprayed (the trick is to tuck their tails under their butts, so if they do spray, they spray themselves). However, I have to note that upon entering the room, being sprayed was unbelievably second on my list of concerns. The smell of the room was almost noxious (imagine stale skunk spray, stale animal feeces and urine, general wild animal smell and that probably only begins to cover it). I have to admit, after a while you get used to the smell, but for at least the first few minutes I was worried about the actual ability to breathe. But I also have to say that the skunks were quite adorable. Even as juveniles they are as capable as adults of both spraying and recognizing threats (aka, us). When we went towards their cage they would back up into a corner, stomping their feet and opening their mouths (Future warning: if you see a skunk do this, run away. If you keep going towards them their next step is to turn around, lift their tails and probably let it rip). The little ones attempted to do this, and may have succeeded once or twice, but most of the time we managed to get our hands on them first, tucking their tails underneath them, like i mentioned before,

(Again, thanks google)

and wrapping them in old pillowcases to make a "skunk burrito," making sure to cover their eyes. (For some reason, almost every wild animal is calmed, at least somewhat, by covering their eyes). Anywho, our job with the little skunks was to weigh each individual, record the weights and then clean out their cages and then give them their food. Like I said, i'm not convinced I actually got sprayed, but the odor in the room was so cloying that for the rest of the day I couldn't get it out of my nose and when i got home later, i noticed my clothes completely stunk. I guess laundry days will be happening quite often :P

I also got the chance to explore other less "glamorous" parts of wildlife care, including washing what felt like 100+ dishes and changing water dishes. However I did get to help a volunteer feed some crows and ravens, which were still young enough that we needed to hand feed them. If they were hungry they would open their beaks open and we would place bits of "crow food" in their mouths. (To the best of my knowledge, crow food comprised of dry and wet dog food, mixed with bits of egg and other meat). These birds are some of the animals that have to be fed every couple of hours, so i'm sure I'll be doing this task pretty often.

Hard to believe that was all only one day (about 7 hours to be exact). I'm wiped but excited to keep seeing what new experiences await. There appears to be almost no boundary between staff and intern/volunteer, so we are included in basically every aspect of the rehabbing process and get to do everything and anything. The wifi at the place I'm staying is pretty patchy, so I don't know when my next update will be, but hopefully soon!

Peace, love and skunk-free air.

BOS --> LAX

It feels like just yesterday that I sat in this same spot and typed out my very first blog post, preparing to dive into the most incredible yet crazy three months of my life (see my previous blog KangarooTales, for proof). This time my journey is definitely less strenuous, (CA vs. AUS) although I feel the all too familiar pre-departure-butterflies coming alive in my stomach. My oversized camping bag is packed to the point I'm actually concerned it may explode on the flight, and my backpack is crammed with my new camera and my on-flight entertainment (Game of Thrones Book 5 and my music - although to be honest I probably will just pass out the whole way there). I'm excited to start this new adventure, but at the same time I feel that I barely got used to being home before I'm having to say goodbye all over again. But i'm sure i'll feel that this summer, as it always does, will fly by.

I decided to start a blog up again so that I could keep my friends and family posted on my adventures this summer, and depending on where my life-journey takes me, perhaps even beyond. This summer I am heading off to Calabasas California (yes, home to the infamous Kardashian clan), where I will be interning at the California Wildlife Center (http://www.cawildlife.org/). The center works to care for and rehabilitate thousands of injured and orphaned wildlife every year, and as an intern I will be helping out in the day-to-day operations in the center, experiencing everything from intake to release (hopefully!) I don't yet know the specifics of my daily schedule, but stay tuned for updates sometime next week, once I've had a chance to settle in and get my bearings. All i've been told is that the work is dirty, smelly and keeps me busy from start to end. All i'm praying is that I can keep up and that I don't get bitten by a rattlesnake or get sprayed by a skunk...

For the next ten weeks I am going to be rooming with a fellow intern at the guest house of one of the center's volunteers. The house is located about 3/4 miles from the center (hello hiking to work) and from what i've heard and cannot wait for, is that the scenery and environment is absolutely breathtaking. I am excited to get out there and get a chance to explore the area!

Sorry this initial post isn't very fascinating, but hopefully I can whet your blog-reading appetites by listing what you can hopefully look forward to in future posts:
- pictures of animals (I have heard that the taking of pictures of the patients is monitored by the center staff, so i will probably have limited pictures of the animals, but I'll see what I can swing).
- pictures of the beautiful scenery - definitely
- pictures of LA - probably boring to some, but hey, it's California ;)
- stories about almost dying of either a) boredom stuck in LA commuter traffic or b) run ins with crazy LA drivers
- accounts of interesting wildlife that comes into the center, interesting humans that bring the animals to the center, interesting encounters with staff/other interns/volunteers.
- the day to day life and whatever other craziness i can come up with =P

Well I hope this first post hasn't been too torturous and I will hopefully be writing again real soon.

Peace, love and smooth travels.