I lyke burds

G'day! 

Hey guys! Things have been pretty awesome this side of the world! I just finished my first week at the zoo working with the birds.
I really like the bird section a lot. Yeah I know, real surprising :P
I've become pretty good friends with one of the zoo keepers Charlie, and he has been giving me lifts home and such to save money. He offered to drive me to work on Thursday morning, however, I have to be there by 8:30-9 and he has to be there by 6-6:30. Blehhh haha But I decided to show initiative and took the early ride there. The bird and mammal supervisor, James, was also there preparing food. So they basically gave me all the ingredients to make food for most of the birds. It was pretty fun. I got to prepare food for the emus, finches, fig parrots, lorikeets, ect. While I was preparing the food, Charlie and James went out into the park to feed all the birds in the park and bring back the old bowls.

The work was pretty easy, you just cut up lots of fruits and vegetables into cubes for the bigger birds or you grate the fruits/vegetables for the smaller birds. The only real problem I had were the damn sweet potatoes. I don't know what they do here, but there sweat potatoes are on steroids. They are basically the length of my forearm and can be up to twice the width of my arm. They are basically a full meal within itself. I have never seen them so huge. Crazy. So they can sometimes be pretty hard to cut since they are pretty cold when they come out of the refrigerator. These birds eat like kings, I swear to god.  They definitely have a better diet than I did in college :/
So most of the bird work is food prep, cleaning, taking bowls away, giving them new food, and random odd jobs.
The zoo has a quite an array of birds ranging from pelicans, to cassowaries, to lorikeets, as well as brolgas. It's cool to get to see them all and learn more about them.

Pelicans
 
I really like the pelicans, the zoo has three. One male and two females, all of them had accidents that requires them to stay in captivity. The male is quite a ham, he goes right to the front of the exhibit and opens his mouth blocking the females. He then rubs his beak on the nearby trees to "sharpen" his beak. So I sometimes get to feed them which is fun. Peliy, the male, is a brat and gets angry if you feed any of the other pelicans and will start biting at the trees and such. Sometimes the pelicans aren't very hungry and they'll just let the fish drop to the bottom. So I was watching the fish fall then all of a sudden I saw the fish starting to thrash in the murky water! I was like, Woahhh Wtf??. Haha i was scared but apparently there are some huge eels that just bro chill there. I guess they came from a nearby river or something and they just nom on all the fish the pelicans don't eat. Not a bad life. There are also some turtles that chill out there with the pelicans. They are really pretty birds and I couldn't help but think of Finding Nemo.

Brolga
 
The zoo also has three brolgas, which are basically Australian cranes. They are really cool looking and really tall. They also have a really cute/cool trumpet call. We have one, Billy, with an exhibit with some wallabies and invader ducks. He's kinda of a brat and will try to nip at you if you are you in his exhibit. So when he gets near you, you're suppose to turn your back to him and push him away then he'll kinda wander away. So we were cleaning his food trough and bringing him more food and as we were leaving he gave me a little nip. It didn't hurt at all it was kinda just a light bite from more up his beak. Oh Billy.

We then fed the other two which is a mating couple. The male is very protective of the female so we can't even go in the exhibit to change their food. The door is equipped so you can turn it and there will be another gate to keep them closed while you change their food. While I was watching the procedure, the male snuck up behind me and nipped me pretty hard. When they really want to get you they, they can grab you with the tip of their beak and actually twist it a little bit. I thought I got stung by a bee or something. But I can't get too mad, he was just trying to defend his mate. After that, I wasn't really nervous of Billy anymore. Billy doesn't really mean any harm. Later, I cleaned Billy's little pond. He totally wasn't near the pond at all until he saw that it was emptying then he decides that it's the perfect time to stand in them middle of it. I guess he's fascinated by the suction of the water flowing out. He would stick his beak near the drain and then lift and shake his head. While I was waiting for it to drain, Nakeisha was walking by and said Hi. She asked what I was doing and I told her I was going to clean the pond. She saw that he was in the pond and asked how I was going to get him out without getting nipped. I told her it was no big deal and I just put my back to Billy and was like, "Oh excuse me Billy, Pardon me, But you will have to move now!". He seemed a little indignant, but he moved away. So now I really like Billy, I think I might just like his name. Billy just seems like such a funny name for some reason. He also shed a secondary feather, which is freaking huge, so I obviously put it in my hair at work and pretended I was Australian Pocahontas. Some of the zookeepers were making fun of me, but I'm sure they were just jealous :P

No... We must DANCE

The Brolga are actually known for their mating dance. While we were taking pictures, Charlie saw the Billy really wanted to dance. So we danced together. It was a pretty glorious moment for me.

Cockatoos
 
The zoo also carries quite a few cockatoos. We have an aviary that has many beautiful black cockatoos and pink cockatoos. We usually go into there to change their "browse" or enrichment branches and change their food. They are definitely beautiful, but they are also really loud! They also spazz all the time. You'll walk to side of the aviary, and they'll screech and fly to the other side. Then you walk back to do something and they'll screech and fly the other way. I mean, how long have they been there? Is it really necessary to have a panic attack every time?

They also have 3 white cockatoos that they display around the park. One in the front and two near the cafe area. They are really pretty and some of them can speak pretty well. Charlie, the zookeeper, and Taz the cockatoo are friends. It's cute to see Taz cuddle up on Charlie's neck. At the end of the day, Charlie and I took the white cockatoos to their night roost in the emu exhibit.

Charlie and I also have done some enrichment items for the white cockatoos where we get some cardboard and mash it up into a shape and put treats in it! We also gave them some ice cubes to play with.

Taz playing with her new toy

Taz destroying her new toy

Emus

So emus are probably one of the funniest birds ever. I freaking love these emus.

Curious male saying Good Mornin'

The zoo has a male and female. They are so tall! When the female stretches out her neck she's almost taller than me! The one thing I love about animals is that they all have different personalities. You have to bring a rake in to the exhibit because female basically hates humans and always tests the new person that walks in. So she'll come up to you and try to bully/kick you, but then you push her away with the rake or hold it above her head she'll back off. She also makes this drumming noise that's really interesting. No one really likes my imitation though :c Emus gauge "danger" based on height, so if you have something that is taller than her then she'll back off and try again later. The male is the total opposite. He loves humans, almost a little too much. I was raking some leaves and he came to check me out. Then he started to get real low to the ground and kinda started bobbing. I was like, Uhhh okay..? and petted him a little bit. Then the zookeeper is like, "uh oh, He really really likes you!". So basically the male was trying to court me and getting ready to mount me.
 

 ohhhh myyyyyy.

I guess he was really attracted to my very sexy hiking/working boots. I mean who isn't? :p So you basically have to watch out for the female to kick the shit out of you or the male to hump you. NBD.

Kookaburra
 
We also have a birds of prey aviary that has 2 species of kookaburra, the laughing one and the blue-winged one. They are really cool birds. The laughing kookaburra has the most interesting call: Lawling kookaburra

So they all chill on this one sign and all do their call. The blue-winged call isn't as strong as the laughing one, but he tries. It's funny, the kookaburra is really oddly proportioned so their head look way to big for their little body and their beak is huge too. But I must say, I do love their nursery song.
Kookaburra song

Spoonbill
 
The bird of prey also has a couple spoonbills that are always freaking out and flying around for no real reason. It's kinda funny, I'm not even close to them raking some leaves, and then they'll just balk and fly to this little roof thing.

Bush Thick-Knees
 
There are also some of these bush thick-knees that are about as tall as my knees. They have huge eyes and are always glaring at you. They look so angry all the time, and if you get too close they start hissing at you hardcore. They are really grumpy birds, but funny grumpy.

 They have a couple in the cockatoo aviary and there is one female that is nesting and she'll just sit in one spot totally vertical and still. By doing this, she thinks I can't see her so I try to be respectful and play along like I can't see her under the very thin bush/browse. There are also a couple of owls but I haven't done much with them.

Parrots 
 
There is also a Rainforest Aviary! It's full of really beautiful birds like a ton of rainbow lorikeets, eclectus parrots, glossy ibis (i think), and few more. The lorikeets have the highest pitch call, it pierces right through your eardrum. Especially when they get excited around dinner time. We have 1 male electus parrot and 2 female electus parrots. They are interesting because the male and females have very different coloration with the males being bright green the the females red with hints of blue. The male, Eddie, really loves one of the female zookeepers Irene. When we went in, he swoops down onto her shoulder and cuddles against her neck and grooms her a bit. It's really cute and sweet.

The lorikeets are really beautiful too. At night, I help feed them dinner which is a nectar mixture. They get soo excited when they know it's coming, they start screeching like madness and will all come down. So I get the hold the bowl with all the nectar and I had like 20 lorkieets on me!! It was amazing! I love feeding the lorkieets c:

Cassowary
 
Last, but definitely not least, is the ancient cassowary. These birds are really amazing looking. They have such bright colors on their throat, black bodies, and this large, curved horn on their head. They still aren't really sure what the horn is used for, at scientist theorize that it was used for defense against running in the bush from plants, dominance displays for females, and even a sound amplifier. They are in the same family as the emu and the ostrich, they are the third tallest and second heaviest. They are usually pretty shy in the wild, but if provoke, they can give you a mean kick that can cause a lot of damage. They are really strong. The zoo has 2 cassowaries, an adult female, Xena, and a juvenile male Marbo (?). Xena is pretty nice, although we are not allowed to go into her exhibit, we can still hand-feed her. She loves grapes and kiwis c: I like Xena a lot. James, the Bird and Mammal Supervisor, does a lot of conservation work with the Cassowaries in captivity. He's basically in charge of designing a captive breeding program for these birds. He has the studbook and he gets together with other zookeepers and scientist to figure out the best way to get more viable young. James was nice enough to show me his research and how it was written out and stuff. It related a lot to Demographics and Genetics (Shout out to Ruth and Marianna!!!) So I told him about the beetles, experience, and my experiment. So it was cool to be able to share that knowledge and see how it is incorporated into conservation work!! Yay!!!

Xena Warrior Cassowary

1st Day At Work!

G'day.

 

Soooo I'm way behind on my posts haha. Sooo much has happened that I don't I'm almost afraid to start writing since I feel like I'll never stop! I'll eventually do the other posts about the Bridging the Cultures thing with the rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef!
But I'm going to just work on what I've worked with/on so far at the zoo!

So Nakeisha and I started yesterday at the zoo!

Very exciting. It was around a 50 minute bus ride with roundabouts every block or so. (Not really) But it felt like it. We were turning so much I was starting to get a little car sick. Bleh Haha but I felt better once we got there.

The zoo is so beautiful. It's basically sitting in a rainforest and they really did a good job incorporating the natural scenery into the zoo environment. It's a smaller zoo, but still really cool. They really allow the guests to interact with the animals which is great for education and allowing people to feel a better connection to the animals. They have kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, cassowaries, wombats, crocs, many tropical birds, birds of prey, and I'm sure plenty of reptiles.. I haven't been to the reptile house yet. 

So Nakeisha got our assignments, each one of us is going to work in one department for 2 weeks. So I start with BIRDS!!!! (@Gem + Dana) followed by reptiles, and mammals last. Nakeisha starts with mammals then goes to birds then reptiles last... I think.

So I went to the "hospital" where they have all the food for all the animals and met some of the birds people. I basically hung out with Khristina all day, she's a bird/mammal zoo keeper. She's really sweet and we went around cleaning the ponds of most of the bird exhibits. Next we went over to this truck with lots of branches with leaves on it. We grabbed a lot of branches and sorted them out to give to the birds to tear up/make the exhibit look nicer. The zoo recycles the eucalyptus branches from the koalas as well as other plants that have been overgrown then give it to the birds to rip up or just hid in. That was really cool. So once we grabbed our branches we went to some of the enclosures. The rooms behind all these exhibits are so freaking tiny. I have no idea why they are so tiny. It can barely hold 2 people and now we are bringing a freaking tree into the mix. It was quite crazy. So Khristina gave me a quick intro on what to do. The exhibits have long, black cylinder pots hanging with plants in them. So first you remove the old plant, empty the water, fill with new water, and add the new branch. See, it seems really easy, and maybe for anyone else in the world it would have been. But naturally it was a huge fiasco with me haha.

So I go into this really small enclosure with a little kingfisher and a fruit dove and I see the pot and the branch and I'm all like, "Oh I totally got this" and then I grabbed the branch. Well the branch went in the pot a lot more than I thought and it was little too big for the enclosure in general so I try to pull it out and it was stuck so I had to pull and shake the stupid branch wit all my might scaring the shit out of the two little birds. They were fluttering around like crazy while I'm losing a wrestling match with the stupid branch. I finally got the branch out with the exhibit totally and completely covered in leaves. Awkward. So I take the branch out to the behind the scenes room and come back to do the water part. Then I realized how easy it was to take the pot off the wall. So I could have just taken the stupid pot off and taken the branch out and didn't have to cause permanent emotional scarring on the fruit dove and kingfisher. Sorry :(

After discovering that handy little trick, it was much faster to do the rest of the pots and branches. So I basically became an interior designer for birds! ;D We worked on that until lunch.
Here are some final products!!

After lunch, we did some odd jobs working with different birds. I helped feed the juvenile male cassowary which was really cool and I helped trim one of the exhibits since it was growing all crazy. Well... I just held the ladder in place and watched a tiny wallaby eat a strawberry c:

That was basically my day!

Went To Bed Monday, Woke Up Wednesday

G'day Mate from Down Under!

I’m now in Cairns, Australia! It’s so amazing over here I’ve been having so much fun! I met most of the other interns at LAX, everyone is super nice. It’s really interesting to see all the different personalities and what everyone is doing. Two girls are doing sea turtle conservation and most of the others are doing business related internships. I’m surprised there are so many business people over here, I would never think of coming to Oz to sit at an office. But I guess I could never really see myself at an office.

The plane ride was actually great, I stayed awake for like 2 hours in order to get dinner at like midnight then slept on and off for almost 10 hours! I didn’t even have enough time to watch a movie, I just watched some family guy and big bang theory then we were landing. I was actually shocked that it worked out so well. I can almost never fall asleep on planes. However, the plane left at like 10:30 pm, so Grandma Courtney was already pretty tired. But every time I woke up I was like...

I sat next to nice two older women who were also going to explore Cairns and Sydney. It was really cool. Apparently these 4 friends get together and travel around the world. They have been to Spain, France, Greece, Turkey, ect.. I think it would be so awesome to travel with a good group of girlfriends when I’m older. 

Then we landed!

The airports were a little different security wise here than in America. It’s a lot more laid back. When we were clearing customs they would ask if we had any food. If you said yes they would only ask what it was and you didn’t even need to show them. I thought that was funny. Also when we were walking through you could give them your customs/immigrant card and then you would walk down a certain row. Almost my whole group got row 6 and I got row 8. So I thought the lady made a mistake or something so I joined row 6. I was quite silly because almost everyone in my group was in a quarantine line and I was going to go straight through. I obvi have a very trusting face. ;) So I basically signed up myself for a quarantine check where they had a beagle smell all of our luggage. It was kinda cute to have a beagle instead of a more intimidating dog like a German Shepard or something. But I was randomly getting worried that I missed something and they would put me in a room in the back while they go through my entire luggage. However, everyone made it through after a few confiscated bananas.

 After that we had to go to another terminal to get to Cairns. So we all went through security again, which was really relaxed. All they wanted out was your laptop and aerosols. We weren’t sure exactly what they wanted at first so we all American on them and took everything off and out to be scanned. It was really funny, an intern in front of me went through the metal detector and he did it LAX style so he went sideways and crossed his arms and just stood there. He thought that it was the ones where you stand for a few seconds as it scans around your whole body. Alas, the scanner was just a normal one so the Aussie Security woman was like, “What the hell are you doing? Have you never been through a metal detector before?” Then the intern was really confused and embarrassed so she told him to just go through it again. So he went through then paused in the middle again. The lady was getting so annoyed; she was like, “just walk through it!” In the end he finally got it and just walked through. The other security guard, an older man, told the woman security guard, “Oh they are Americans, in America they make going through the airport scary and that they should be afraid of everything.” I thought that was really funny and totally true. 

We all then got to our second terminal and then took a 3 hour flight up to Cairns! I just read the whole time and sat next to this older woman. When we landed she looked over to me and said, “I like that you’re a reader, I hate talking to people on the flight.” Haha I agreed. Then we all finally landed in Cairns!! Yay!!

We then met up with our trip advisor/leader person to take us all to the hostel.

This is what you call a “party hostel” haha. We are basically next to a tattoo piercing parlor and across the street is a stip joint called the “toy box” haha. But still an alright area. We had a meeting almost right away to talk about the hostel/area/schedule/ect. In which I got my awesome phone!!!!! <3 <3

I can still barely use it. It’s quite pathetic. It should be illegal to go from iphone to this little Nokia. All of us were having trouble just putting numbers in it and texting takes about 20 minutes. I’m starting to get a little better at it and it has some games like sudoku and forbidden treasures, which is cool. It also has a flashlight. Yeah, definitely best phone eva. Yes I'm high maintenance.

We had a small session to learn more about Australia and Australian culture. I was pretty jet lagged by then so I don’t really remember much ;) BUT I do remember a fun little game where we played Bingo with Aussie slang. Can YOU figure out the Aussie Slang?

Esky

Ripper

Tinny

Wanker

Mate

Thongs

Sticky-Beak

Kip

Cactus

Bloke

Haha so that was pretty fun. After that we went back to the hostel to get our phone situation figured out and chill out. Once we got the phone situation under control for the most part we all went out for dinner. We could choose a few options like Fish and Chips, Caesar Salad, Chicken Parimgana, and steak and chips. Guess what I got? Haha

 It was a huge group of people. It was a mix of interns as well as students going to a business school. There were a lot of Americans, some Swedish people, German, and an Austrian. It was a cool mix for sure. I sat next to my Cairns/Zoo roommate Nakeisha and we bonded over animals and scared our neighboring people talking about how ducks have a corkscrew penis and how bonobos are very sexual animals and solve all their problems through different acts of sex. Yeah. It happens. ;)

After dinner we went back to the hostel. Some people went bed right away and others went downstairs to check out the bar scene. I wasn’t really tired yet so I joined some of the people at the bar to chill out and stuff. However, Wednesday night happens to be Bogan Bingo night!!!

It was crazy, these two Aussie guys were up there basically dressed up in fake mullets and short shorts. Bogan bingo is similar to regular bingo but kinda not really at the same time. You get this card with numbers on it and then they call out numbers. If you have that number you cross it out and if you cross out all the numbers within 1 of 3 sets then you win.

 So I played some bingo but unfortunately lost. They were soo crazy haha I couldn’t even handle them. A lot of cussing, a lot of innuendos, and a lot of fun. There were like 4 blow up/balloon guitars in front of their stage if they played the AC/DC song “Back in Black” you could rush up to stage, grab one, and then play air guitar. Once you got your guitar and played it for a while, you were automatically entered into another air guitar contest. Whoever got the most cheers won a really awesome prize like rafting or scuba and stuff. One of the American students won, he took off his shirt and totally dropped it like it’s hot. It was impressive I must say ;P

 I didn’t stay out too much longer after the first game since we had a big day the next day but it was definitely worth experiencing!