Lane Boy, by twenty one pilots
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On July 24th, I took my final exam for my internship. It was relatively easy, seeing as it was open note. My boss wanted us to be able to look up information we need rather than relying on memory - a thought I hugely appreciated for some questions.
The community at this place was amazing. I wish I had been a volunteer with the wildlife instead of with the dogs those three years ago. The area was much smaller, and I actually was able to recognize and talk to the other people who worked there. There was a lot more to do when I got bored, even though I was there nine hours each shift.
I can't really have a single topic for this post; rather, I'm just going to recount some thoughts and fond memories I had during this experience.
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Towards the end, I was on lunch break with a 3rd term intern (I was 2nd term). Early on she had come to me seeking a sort of mentor, because I was called in on an off day to help with staff shortage, and she was in Recovery by herself with no other staff on her first day. Anyways, during the lunch we somehow got to talking about the staff and other people at the workplace and our relations with them. We talked about the friendliness/not-so-friendliness of the various staff members there, and in order to make her feel better I recounted my experiences and first impressions of them to kind of give her some "inside intel."
She then likened me with a different intern - an intern who, in 1st term, acted as my own mentor. I hugely admire her for being so amiable and very clearly liked by everyone. She is hardworking, reason-driven, and pretty knowledgable about wildlife medicine in a program where most people are newcomers to the field. From the beginning I aspired to be like her; I have a (perhaps unhealthy) need to please people - I crave praise and recognition.* I wanted to be as well-liked as her.
So when my friend told me I was like this 1st term intern - as well as I can remember it, she said, "You're like MS, it seems like everyone likes you" - it felt as though my consciousness burst out of my body and went spiraling up into the sky. It was the best thing anyone had said to me all summer.
It was similar to another experience I had, though I'll explain the differences later. About a week before my term ended, my boss pulled me into his office and had me shut the door and everything. He told me he just wanted to say that I had done a superb job that summer, and everyone (staff) not only liked working with me, but looked forward to my shifts because "they knew that everything would go smoothly and quietly when I was around." He told me I was definitely one of the favorite interns. I wonder if he knows, due to my record-low confidence, how much saying that really meant to me.
It's different than the comment from the intern though, because I feel as though praise directly from your peers means a lot more than something said to you through a grapevine. I'm incredibly gratified by both comments - they both say practically the same thing - it's just that one of them felt a lot more intimate.
*Ironic, because I have no idea how to receive praise and recognition. I'm the vending machine trying to accept a wrinkly dollar.
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Raccoons are demon terrors spawned from the Seventh Circle of Dante's Hell. Baby raccoons, on the other hand, are the cutest goddamn things anyone will ever see with their mortal eyes. Especially when they nurse.
And owls are among the most crazy defensive birds we get - they like to go for the eyes. Hawks, oddly enough, are pretty chill - depending on the species and size (smaller = crazier).
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Seeing the reasons why animals come in has made me pretty angry at the world population. We see lots of birds come in who were caught by cats, whose owners no doubt think it's perfectly natural and okay for a domesticated species to hunt live food, and therefore let their cat outdoors. I don't want to count the number of birds we had to pull due to subcutaneous emphysema - subcutaneous meaning "under skin" and emphysema meaning "trapped air." Basically, a bird's respiratory system consists of six air sacs which act as bellows, moving oxygen around. If one of them is ruptured, the air is released under the skin and creates a giant bubble I saw most often on the leg.
We also get in a lot of "bird-napped" nestlings, where unsuspecting people picked a bird off the sidewalk thinking it was abandoned (it probably isn't, most birds people bring in are fledgelings that just can't fly well yet. Besides, it is a complete myth that parents won't return to a baby bird with human scent on it). I am much more inclined to be sympathetic to these people, as I'm sure they thought they were doing the right thing. It just creates more work for us, treating an already healthy bird to release.
But most recently, the most common species we've been getting in seasonally uncommon numbers is the common murre:
*Like all seabirds, their beaks are sharp and they're not afraid to use them. I still have a scar on my thumb due to another intern's lack of attention to restraining the head while I held the body (he had a good distraction, it was an interesting injury).*
This time, it's not really any individual's fault, but rather a perverse group effort. Before your imagination takes you somewhere else, I'm talking about climate change.
People can say whatever they want, but it's inarguable that the global average temperature is slowly increasing - by .8 Celsius since 1880, or 1.4 Fahrenheit, with two-thirds of this warming occurring since 1975. (earth observatory.nasa.gov) Warmer waters means species shift locations to find ranges that still support their abiotic tolerances. In this case, fish are swimming to deeper, cooler depths than the young, inexperienced murres can dive to. Because of this, nearly all of the murres we're getting have emaciation as their main ailment. Just before I left, we got in four fledgling murres, one with a fractured wing, and all of them needed to be gavaged, or tube fed formula, because they were too weak to feed themselves. Right now, at a sister facility, they have over 200 murres - a number way above average. I shudder to think how many more don't make it to the facilities in the first place. It's pretty awful. More can be read here.
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That pretty much wraps up my last few weeks as an intern, and then the following few weeks as a regular volunteer before I left for college. I don't know if I want to pursue wildlife rehabilitation as a job, though it does pop up under the potential jobs on my major's page. My boss even said that if I weren't still going though college, I'd have a "golden ticket" to a job at their newest facility elsewhere in the Bay Area - me and my fellow 2nd term intern.
The work is certainly incredibly rewarding, and some staff members there revealed they didn't even pursue tertiary education very passionately and yet they still ended up in a medical field. I would love to work with animals, always have, but job comfort and income are also important factors to me, and wildlife rehab isn't a very lucrative job. But that's an existential crisis for another day.
