Saturday Morning: For the Birds

Part of the application process of getting into veterinary school actually happens well before you even think about starting the actual application. To be considered for acceptance into a veterinary program, one must first log in hundreds of hours of employment or volunteer time spent working in science or with animals to satisfy a number of “non-academic prerequisites.” It is really never too early to begin working on these particular prerequisites. Virginia Tech, for example, recommends 400-600 hours of clinical experience in an animal hospital, 200-300 hours of large or mixed animal experience (i.e.- horses, zoo animals, commercial/food animals), and yet another 100-300 hours working in a corporate or research setting. On the high side, that’s roughly 1200 hours of scooping poop and not getting paid for it. For those following along at home, the average full time job rings in 2080 hours annually. This means that in the middle of working and schooling full time, I have to figure out how to defecate more hours out of an already constipated schedule to the tune of another half time job. Giving myself 2-3 years to knock this out is probably one of my better decisions I’ve made yet!

Being thusly short on free time, a girl needs to get creative. This means finding little snippets of volunteer efforts in which to become involved for the sake of sharpening my skills of making mountains from molehills. More on this later…

My first volunteer opportunity was on March 1st. The task was to assist the “Wildlife Coordinators” (Hoo doggy, DO NOT call them Park Rangers!) at the Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge with counting blue heron nests in the rookery located on the banks of the Potomac River. Not real hands on, mind you, but still science-y nonetheless.

My contact, Marty, who at this point I only know through emails, advised us volunteers to meet up at the rally point at 0800 (for my civilian friends, that 8:00 am – aka too damn early on a Saturday). So, wanting to make a great first impression for my new “friends,” I woke up nice and early (grumble) and made it to the front gate at 0745 (translation: 7:45a…you’ll catch on, I promise). Here’s what welcomed me:



Son of a baby biter, I should have known! How could I forget that I was dealing with the federal government? Ugh. So there I sat for 20 minutes until Ranger - I’m sorry, Coordinator - Grumpy Pants came to open up the gate. Seriously, he was a real bear. I said a friendly good morning, he snarled at me. I was going to take a picture of his sour puss, but he looked like he’d eat my camera if I did.

After he opens up the gate, I continue to the rally point, knowing full well I’d be there way before anyone else. Sure enough, it was a full 45 minutes until someone else, showed up. “Did I miss the memo?” I ask my fellow volunteer. Apparently, I did. There was an email sent out the night before moving the meeting time to the right an hour. Figures. I was at the Jeff Dunham show when that came in and I never bothered to check my email before bed. I could have slept in an hour longer. I could have bathed! Ah!

The refuge is a beautiful wooded area right on the Potomac River – pretty rare in these parts. I took these pictures while waiting for everyone else to drag their sorry butts out of bed.




Notice my trusty steed in front of the maintenance shed. I’ll never get rid of that vehicle!

Finally everyone shows up. The turn out was lower than expected, but enough to get the job done. We were divided into different groups (I got to be in the group that did the most hiking, which is way cool), got briefed in on what we needed to do and piled into the vans for the short drive down to the dike that served as the outside boundary of the rookery. In short, we were to count the heron nests that we found, record the number and put chalk lines on the trees so they weren’t doubled counted. Not brain science, but probably about as much as I cared to handle on Saturday morning. I got to be the data recorder – a position that I handily placed myself into for reasons I’ll detail later.

All in all, it was a really cool experience. We saw a ton of heron nests and even more blue herons flying around.



These birds must have smurfs as general contractors, so indicated by their aerial subdivisions. There were many, many trees that looked like this.



As many nests as we counted (rough count was 788), it was still not good news for the herons. According to Coordinator Joe, the trend over the last seven years or so has been a slight, but steady decline in the heron population as well as a marked eastward shift of their habitat. It was also rumored that more nests had been found on the ground this year than had in years past. I guess even the blue herons aren’t safe from the effects of a crappy real estate market.

One hypothesis into the decline of the heron population has stemmed from an increase in the bald eagle population. As they compete for the same resources, bald eagles – the larger, more aggressive of the two species (who have clearly mastered the art of the avian McMansion) – appear to be running the herons out of their happy home. I’ll let you play with the symbolism on this one.



Bottom line, it was a fun, unique experience. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

My take aways:

- I have officially logged four hours of science / animal experience under my belt which, of course, further cements my aspirations to get into veterinary school (there’s no way I’d miss sleeping on a Saturday unless there was a really good reason).
- This makes great application fodder. As per my duties as “data recorder,” I “tracked” blue heron habitats (walked around aimlessly waiting for teammates to call out numbers), “recorded observations” (wrote numbers on a paper), “analyzed the resulting statistical data” (added up the columns at the end), and “submitted the findings to the lead research team” (left the clipboard on the table). Hey, you write enough resumes, you’re bound to become a skillful BS technician.
- I made some great contacts so that maybe, just maybe, they’ll call me back to help conduct some actual research.

On my way home from the Wildlife Refuge, I found a government owned stable full of horses. Naturally, I had to stop in to see what it was all about. That story next time.

BFN.