So today we got to go in late because we were going to be out late watching the bats emerge from Waugh Bridge. When we got into the office, we got to plan our conservation station for the day. Two other girls and I decided we wanted to do something on poaching since that seems to be a hot topic in conservation. Our supervisors made it a competition, per the request of some of our collegues, which I wasn't too sure about. But it turned out fine! Being teachers, they really didn't like choosing one above all the others.
So we set up our station. It had tiger fur as the base. An impala skull, an elephant foot, snare wire, shark jaws, and a dagger made of rhino horn. It was pretty cool, if I don't say so myself. We tried to tie in how they try to catch animals in the snare wire, as a poaching tool, and some get caught on it accidentally, leading to accidental death, basically. The elephants are poached for their horns, which people use in ivory. The rhinos, of course, their horns for daggers and medicine, the so called "cure-all." Impala, snare wire. And sharks are killed for their fins in shark fin soup in some Asian cultures. What's sad is they don't even eat the fin, it's a delicacy that makes the soup taste a certain way. It's just such a waste of a shark to chop off it's fin and throw it back in the ocean, obviously it's not going to survive, especially if it's bleeding out and can't swim.
We got to go out to the elephant yard and talk to people who walked past us about the dangers of poaching and how they threaten already endangered animals in the wild. Our message was a little hard because poaching is such a touchy subject, and making it something doable, like changing what you buy, is a little hard, especially when you don't know which companies use illegally poached material in their fabrics or something.
The other stations that were set up were pollution, and habitat loss. The habitat loss one talked about orangutans and their loss of habitat because of palm oil plantations on their island. They had a list of products that used palm oil and could translate the abstract thing to something that people could do, which was really smart. And the pollution one was pretty simple, recycle! So of course, like I said earlier, our supervisors basically all gave us a different category for what we won so that everyone one. Personally, I think my group could have done better, but it was pretty hard on short notice, especially with such a difficult message.
After this discussion, we had pizza and were ready to go out and see bats! So our supervisor, who's favorite animal are bats, gave us a fabulous presentation teaching us all about bats role in the ecosystem and how unique they are. To me they are so weird! They're like rodents that can fly, but they're closer related to primates, and they seem like birds, but they're mammals, with echolocation like dolphins, and they're just super weird. Actually their wing is structured a lot like our arm, they have all the same bones with extended fingers, and what makes them fly is the flick of the wrist. And all of the myths about bats being nasty and mean are completely not true. They can use their echolocation so exactly, they can detect a single hair if it were the only thing in the room. They are mammals so they have live babies, and have been noted to live 30-40 years, which is really long for such a small creature. They eat all kinds of insects and keep the ecosystem in balance. And every night they clean themselves with their thumbs, they scratch through their fur to make sure nothing is in it, and then fall asleep with their feet attached to the top of a cave or bridge.
The bats that we were going to see, made their home in the extensions of a bridge in the middle of Houston. They come out every night at dusk and provide a pest control to the city that no one else could provide. There are 1/4 of a million bats in this colony and they come out in shifts. So the scouts fly out first, waking everybody up, and then eventually, they form a tornado, and fly out in groups until everyone is out for the night. They come back early in the morning, all fed and happy, eating tons of insects in one night and go to sleep with their babies in their arms. So we got to see all of that at the bridge, and it was super cool! There were so many! And seeing them all fly out was really cool. You could hear them talking, which sounded like chirping, and see little black bodies flying out one side of the bridge. It was actually very interesting, and while I always knew bats were interesting, I had a new appreciation for them. It, like everything else in this internship, was a fun experience, and one I'll never forget.
(This blog was written as if it were Friday, June 8, 2012)
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