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Tomorrow is my first official day off at ICF, and it comes after a tidy five days of work. I'm learning a lot, blah blah blah. Mostly I pick up after birds and do my superiors' bidding. We're busy getting ready for our first crane chick (or colt) next week, which means the chick rearing facility (dubbed iso, short for isolation) has to be disinfected and at the ready. For me that means weeding sweet clover and thistle in the outer yards, and raking the sand in the indoor runs.

Which doesn't mean my life has been bird free. Every morning we-the-interns clean Crane City, four streets of pens and houses containing...well, enough birds. We also clean the indoor enclosures for the birds on display. The strangest thing about captive animals is how anthropomorphized they are, with their quirks and problems: one pecks at a doorknob, another can't be let inside because she won't go out, another chases his shadow, one hates women. The picture is of Chip and Crockett, the display whoopers, who keep building nests but don't lay eggs. These aren't healthy behaviors for a bird (well, the last doesn't matter much, except as it's a pain for me), and I would venture to say they'd be deemed unhealthy in humans as well. But they make life interesting.