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Featherbrain

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Yeah this is pretty much what my brain has felt like these past two weeks.


I'm usually not into sharing my career related stuff with the internet unless it's causing delays for commissioners but now I just gotta vent for once. Everyone that isn't interested in biology, birds, or in general personal happy stuff can stop reading here.

 

Some of you might know that I study biology and that I love it. But the thing I'm most passionate about is the study of behaviour. Since high school I wanted to once work in the field of behaviour-research of either whales (and dolphins, for your weird english taxonomy-people) or birds and I scored guys. I scored and got the ultimate jackpot guys.

So as you may know I have to write a bachelors thesis to successfully graduate and you have to conduct a very own study and write a paper all by yourself for a biology bachelors thesis.


See, I was very anxious whenever I thought about the future and having to write a thesis like that. After my experiences in the genetics-lab (the one with the nematodes [worms] some of you might remember) my anxiety rose even more because chances are pretty damn high to end up in one of those or something similar for a bachelors thesis because labs like this need most help. Thing is I didn't enjoy the job in the lab at all and thus was pretty afraid of having to work -a whole semester- in one where the results of my work would be crucial for my graduation.

So yeah until this semester I feared the bachelors thesis. Like damn hell I was terrified of it.
Thing is I managed to get a spot in the course "behaviour and neurobiology" which was one of the courses I've been looking forward to since being a freshman. This course has changed so much for me.
What they did is take the whole horde of students to the zoo and let us conduct a observational study on apes and other monkeys that we had to design by ourselves. This has shown me that I'm now, after 5 semesters of studying biology, very much capable of designing and conducting my own stories, solving problems they throw at me and get some usable results. It was a nice experience but what really rose me out of my anxiety was that they took us to listen to a talk held by Dr. R, a curator of the Zoo here in Berlin.
He informed us that, starting this year, the Zoo would take in bachelor students and enable them to conduct studies on some of the animals kept there.
Naturally the first thing I did after the talk was go up to Dr. R and introduce myself, make sure that he's at least seen me once and knows that I'm interested.

I'll skip a few things here. After months of work I was able to present my experimental design to him and he accepted it without adding any more critique than I had already prepared myself for °^° <3 !%$&§!

 

Gekvdrhg so basically

what's happening is

that Dr. R is now my Boss and I

will be

working in the Berliner Zoo with NOT ONLY my most favorite birds which are Keas (Nestor notabilis) but also with great green macaws (Ara ambiguus), hyacinth macaws (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus) and red-tailed black cockatoos (Calyptorhynchus banksii) ;-;
You're probably not able to grasp how fucking euphoric this makes me. Gawd. Extasys expression pretty much pictures what I look like whenever I think about my thesis.

So yeah my life has been turned around from having heavy anxiety about my graduation paper to being a ball of happy feathers and adfdgadffggsf.

 

So yeah. Let me calm down here for a second.

I think I pictured all the burbs I'm going to work with in here. I'm not exactly sure if I got the banksiis right because I only know that they've got four of them at the zoo and at least two of them are male. But only one of them is accessible to the public so I'm not sure if the two I haven't met yet and don't know the gender of are females but I just pictured them as such for the variety. You'll notice two of the banksiis having yellow spots. Those are the ladies. The male C. banksii is completely black with red feathers perfectly capable of leaving you in awe if they fan out their tails.

Felix, the one banksii I've met is the biggest sweetheart ever. He'll come up to the fence of his cage and climb up to your sightline and demand scratches. If you dare to turn around and walk out on him hell call after you getting progressively louder the further you go away. Felix even gifted me one of the sticks in his cage when I was at the zoo to research which species of Psittacines they have ;-;. Dr. R told me he'll try to get us an opportunity to go into Felix' cage because Felix is really into long hair. Which I have plenty of. So I'm really looking forward to that.

The two hyacinths are right next to Felix' cage and a really cute couple. Did you know hyacinths are one of the largest parrot species there are? They'll grow up to 1m, that's nearly 40 inches. Those beaks are more than impressive close up.

As for the great greens. I haven't seen much of them because I was so distracted by Felix the two times I was there. They are in one cage with a palm cockatoo, also known as goliath cockatoo (Probosciger aterrimus) so I might get to know the goliath better aswell c:

Goliaths are one of the largest cockatoo species and have the largest psittacine beaks except for the hyacinths. Which is a pretty big deal because they only grow up to 60cm (around 24in) and there are many psittacines bigger than the goliaths but with smaller beaks apparantly.

 

And then there are the Keas. Gawd Keas °^° <3. The few of you that read descriptions might've noticed that Extasy has had Kea inspired wings for a long while already.
I got the chance to go -into- their cage together with Dr. R. So exciting ;-;.
Fred, the male Kea ran right up to me when I kneeled. Stopped about 30cm (~10in) in front of me. Peered at me and then hopped away only to turn 180° and do the same with Dr. R.
Fred's cagemate is a female Kea whom is pretty shy. She refused to climb down her perch and just eyed us a few times.
Dr. R wrote his dissertation about Keas and worked with the ones at the Berliner Zoo as well as the horde they have at the Mahlow bird park. I read it all and thus already knew that the lady kea in the Berliner Zoo is quite the diva. She refused to partake in any experiment of Dr. R and will most likely refuse to work with me also. She's also nameless so I haven't been able to get any idea about her at all. Well let's see maybe I'll be able to interact with her a bit when I start the experimental phase. Even though male Keas are more noisy and curious as the females Fred is pretty lazy too and not as likely to work with me as Felix for example but at least Dr. R got him to partake in his experiments so maybe I'm getting lucky with him as well. If not I'll have to either change my hypothesis to exclude keas or travel to Mahlow. They have a whole flock there that has been kept quite active unlike the two specimen at the Zoo who have been left sitting unentertained in their cage for decades before Dr. R started working with them. So they've developed quite a bit of laziness. Poor fellas.

 

Anyway yeah as you can see I could talk about this to no end but I'll stop right now. Should anyone against my exception be interested in this further feel free to note me c:
Talking about this helps uncover mistakes and errors in my design so it's always helpful.

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Shadow-Dragon-777's avatar
Literally buried in adorbs!!!