Things and stuff

You know, I never thought I'd be one of those people. The people that say "ahhh i don't have any free time!" I always listened to them and thought, "just stop doing so much, it's simple enough". This semester has been a challenge for me. My friend Becca and I, during the summer, decided that this year we were going to buckle down. We were going to keep up with the work. We were going to be awesome students.

And then we volunteered to be the photographers for our Barely There calendar. So the first 6 weeks of this semester were filled with classes followed by photo shoots, people-wrangling and photo editing.

At the Tui brewery shoot

Getting ready for our shoot.

 I also had the bright idea to volunteer to be media rep for the calendar, which, now that the calendar is out, is taking a lot of time as the calendar is always big news. I did my first ever radio interview with my friend, Nikki, a couple weeks ago and have been interviewed for a couple magazines and newspapers.

I've also been working two jobs. One is an extension of the penguin job; I'm working on constructing databases for all of the medical records from animals admitted to the Oiled Wildlife response centre during the spill. The results will be used in papers that the wildlife staff are publishing on the spill response, so I may get a few authorships in publications out of the deal. Yay!

Right now National Geographic is working on a story about the spill featuring Kerri Morgan, one of the vets that I work with, so keep an eye out for that. Pretty cool!

The other job is in the wildlife ward which I mentioned in an earlier post.  Did I tell you guys about the white kiwi?? A couple of weeks ago we had a rare white kiwi in the ward, he swallowed some metal fragments from his habitat.

Kerri, the vet on duty with me, was letting me crop tube the birds that were getting treatments (fluids, meds etc) and she let me crop tube the little white kiwi. It's important when you're crop tubing birds to get the tube down the right hole so you don'y drown them. It's not always immediately noticeable that you've done it wrong and so that night I woke up in a panic, petrified that I had killed the white kiwi by putting the tube down the wrong way. "The nation's gonna hate me, I'll get deported", I thought as I lay awake, anxious and uncertain. The next morning, the first thing I did when I got to work was check on him. Of course he was fine. Kerri laughed when I told her about my worries and said she wouldn't have let me do it if she thought I'd screw it up.

This past weekend I got to help anesthetize a yellow-eyed penguin and a little kiwi chick. I used a little pediatric stethoscope to monitor the baby kiwi's heart while he was under. It was racing so fast, it's hard to believe that a muscle can work that quickly. The yellow-eyed penguin has been nicknamed McSlappy by the residents, he is really adorable. He's about knee-height (much bigger than the little blue penguins) and is totally unfazed by humans. 

He's staying in his own room at the ward right now and twice a day I go in to change his bedding and feed him. I leave the door to his enclosure open and he ambles out and around the room, stretching his legs, stopping periodically to look around and think about things. You can hear his little feet padding along as he walks, it echoes in the concrete room and makes me giggle.

So that's a bit of an update on things. We're in the throes of exams right now so please excuse any mania that ensues. Love to you all!