A Nova Brasileira: Chuvenopolis!

Portuguese word of the day - Chuver; to rain! There is often a joke here to call Vancouver "Vanchuver" since it rains so often. I have also heard them call Florianopolis "Chuvenopolis" and it is definitely living up to that name. It has been cloudy and rainy here for quite a while now and it is starting to give me the blues. I find myself being very lazy and not wanting to leave the house to do anything. There has been lots of tv and movies and not so much portuguese studying or adventuring going on and thus nothing really to blog about.

I mentioned in my last post that the penguins were going to be released Friday afternoon; unfortunately since the weather wasn't cooperating we couldn't do that :( They did get all of their blood tests done and their permanent tags put on so they would be ready for the moment it was nice enough for release! The blood tests came back on Monday and all 11 penguins are healthy and good to go! GREAT new! Unfortunately the weather STILL wasn't nice enough that day to take them out. Fingers crossed we'll be able to do it tomorrow - although I'm not getting my hopes up with this crummy weather.

My turtle project got organized a little on Friday. Since we were not much help with the penguins (too many people) we had plenty of time to mark all of the turtles. We took them all out of their pool and put them into 3 buckets so we could seperate the ones that had been marked from the ones who still needed to get their colours. We used nail polish and a marking system that Vanessa came up with to number each turtle. 54 in total!! Do you know how hard it is to keep track of 54 turtles while you have one in each hand trying to help the nail polish dry faster? All while there is a giant tortoise chasing us around and trying to attack/head butt/bite us - those things are faster than you would think they are!

The marking system - artistically interpreted by yours truly

Monday I was supposed to help a couple people with the parrot project. They were going to be doing some behavior analysis and for part of it they need me to stand perfectly still in the middle of these 30 or so parrots for about 15 minutes; no problem! In return the vet who is on the parrot project was going to show me how I am supposed to measure the legions on my turtles and tell me what measurements I should be recording for each of them. Neither of these things happened though because none of them showed up. I would have started weighing the turtles and measuring them but there were a few problems: the only scale that they have was being used, there are 54 turtles and only one of me, and I didn't know what measurements to take and to only do half of them just to collect them all up again the next time seemed a little counter productive.

Monday was a pretty sad day for me. I felt pretty useless there - even as a volunteer. The morning was productive; we weighed and banded a new penguin that came in covered in oil, cleaned both the penguin areas, cleaned the sea lion and then fed him (he is sooo gentle when he takes his fish! Definitely the highlight of my day). After that however most of my time was spent standing around and watching one of the other volunteers talk to the penguins; yayyyy fun :( I guess he didn't realize that I had been shown how to carry them and that I could actually help him instead of just stand there and watch him feed them really, really slowly. Then we went to change the water for my turtles which went very slowly as well because there is only a small hole to drain the water from and we have to stand there holding the tub on an angle great enough to allow the water to drain for the whole time; maybe i'll have super toned biceps after all this? Then I had to stand there and watch as the water filled up again via the slowest hose known to man. The other volunteer that I had been working with went to get food for them as I supervised the water flow. When he came back I saw that he had only brought fish and not very much of it. It made me really mad that no one has taken the time to figure out what they need in terms of habitat and dietary means. For their housing that they have it could just be that they don't have the resources to get them rocks and such to cover the bottom of their tub but the least they could do is feed them properly. I am making it my personal goal to make sure that I can find more information from a reliable source that I can include in my research so I can show them that they need more than what they are being supplied.

Sorry for the rant and bits of sarcasm. It's just that Vanessa is out of town this week and she told us all that we needed to get as much done in this time that we have because she will only be back for a short time to tell me what behavior analysis I need to do before she goes out of town again. Not only do we need to get a base for each of the turtles but we also need to build a wall to separate the turtles from the tortoises. I really hope that tomorrow they will be there so that we can get this all organized!