Alaskan Adventures: First Cruise Ship!!

Our first cruise ship of the season came in today! That means that today was our first "real" day of work. There were people coming in and out of the Foundation pretty much all day. I was given the privilege of doing the eagle presentations for today so I had to present Scotty, our mature bald eagle three times to three different groups - a grand total of 96 people today. In addition, Claire, Katrina, and Marjorie did live raptor presentations with the birds that they were assigned. Which reminds me, it has been a few days since I've posted so I'll give you a brief recap of the past few days:

Monday:
- We were given different tasks to complete for the day. The biggest one was we had to was take apart and redesign Aspen the Great Grey Owl's mew. This actually ended up taking us two days to complete because the original setup was a bit difficult to take apart. We had to do this because Aspen recently had part of her wing amputated so she has trouble maintaining her balance, which means that she had a tendency to fall off perches and stuff. So what we did to help her out is take everything in her mew and lower it down to about 18 inches off the ground so, if she did fall, it would be a short distance and she wouldn't really hurt herself.
- Another task for the day was digging out a new pond for Bella the Bald Eagle. Myself and Tracy (the Raptor Handler for the ABEF) completed this task. And my back is STILL sore. The hardest part was that the ground of Bella's mew is mostly gravel and big rocks, and it's hard to dig through gravel and big rocks.
- After all that was completed, we took an internship test over all the stuff we had learned the past few weeks. It took an hour and it was actually quite difficult. Luckily, everyone passed :)
- Finally, at the end of the day, Dr. Hart told us which birds we were assigned to take care of for the summer. Claire was assigned to Dylan, Katrina to Hunter, Marjorie to Warrior and Sitka (the Red-Tailed Hawks), and I was assigned to Sarah the Great Horned Owl (yay!).

Tuesday:
- We finally finished Aspen's mew. Then we gave her one last little look over before putting her back in there. She seemed pretty happy with the new design!
- We went over our tests and discussed which areas we needed to focus more study time on.
- We each started spending time with our respective birds. It is expected that we now spend at least an hour each day working with our bird.
- At the end of the day, we had a big staff meeting about what to expect when cruise ships dock in Haines.

Which brings me to today:

Like I mentioned earlier, we each did raptor presentations for the people who visited the Foundation today. I don't know about the other interns, but I was very VERY nervous to be speaking in front of the various tourists today. However, as the day wore on, I started feeling more and more comfortable in front of everyone. I even got to practice some Spanish when I met a couple from Puerto Rico! In the end, I feel that everything went pretty smoothly. We're all super tired now though!