P.O.T.B.R. 2025 Day 12

 Today we visited a multitude of places. Our first visit was the plant nursery with Gaile Redberg who has a bachelors in Biology education and taught that for most of her time until she decided to get a masters in biology. After a while she got into this whole plant nursery management. It's always nice seeing how many different careers everyone has gone through before coming to where they are now. Makes me feel more comfortable trying things out. She showed us around the nursery, they have a lot of different plants that they manage and move around. We helped them trim and move some bigger plants. the work was kind of fun, I think I would like doing that kind of job for a bit. On the way out we were allowed to take a few. I grabbed one for my mom because she loves collecting and caring for different plants. 

    Our next visit was at the Nixyoawii Government Agency with Andrew Wildbill who is part of the Cayuse tribe. He has been working in the Department of natural resources that has 7 different programs and these programs have the support of the First Foods. In his presentation he explained to us the various things that they have been working on regarding the tribes and additional information. He explained how the area of their tribes reservation and how agreements about the lands have been disrespected by the government resulting in a lot of lost land that they were supposed to have. He also explained to us the issue with the huckleberry consumption and how they are trying to figure out how and where the berries are being harvested from. The department works on many different animal documentation projects. Like the lamprey project that his tribe, the Cayuse, started in 1995, the wolf management program and even the Plant nursery we visited earlier that day was supported by the wildlife program. They also helped out the Burrow documentation program that we were going to visit later that day. 

    After that presentation we ate our lunch and then headed to the new location to go check on the burrow owls. The area was located within an old military bunker facility that Andrew told us about earlier. We split into two groups, the majors in the field of study and the non-majors. I was part of the non-majors and we were guided by Lindsiy. Lindsiy guided us through a very bumpy roadway and called for us to be silent when she opened the owl burrows. The goal of the first location was to tag some baby owls that had recently been born in the human made burrows. There were five in the first location that we had to help hold. They made a clicking sound when warning but they were harmless. They pooped and peed on my hands but they were cute. We held them until it was time to tag them and then powder them to get rid of their fleas. The bigger birds get them but they are better at getting rid of them while the babies have a harder time. Once they were powdered we were able to release them back into their burrows which was really funny because of the way they would zoom away. The next location didn't have any babies in them but the third area did. The goal of the third area was to just check up on previously documented owls to see how many were left. Owls usually lay around 8 eggs but only end up with about half in the end. It was really cool being able to hold the owls, I don't think I would have ever done that otherwise. After we finished up there we went to go shower off the fleas that could've got on us.