A Final Goodbye

This Colored Owl Drawing is by John Pusateri. I stumbled
upon it and thought it was beautiful and perfect for my final
post.

The end of this senior research project has come and I have learned a great deal. I would like to thank my school advisor Mr. Nishan, my school counselor Mrs. McConaghy, the people and resources I have consulted, and finally and most importantly the staff at Liberty Wildlife for being so gracious in letting me take pictures, ask questions, and simply taking a chance on me two years ago, when I first sent in my volunteer application, underage with no experience. I have met nothing, but wonderful and kind people through this organization that completely runs on the goodness of peoples’ hearts. While this blog may finish today, I will continue to keep my shifts until I go to University in the fall. And of course, I will come back for peak summer seasons each year! It has been a joy to share my experiences in medical services to anyone willing to read this little blog. Thank you again and goodbye.

CG

You can find more of John Pusateri's work at:

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/11/colored-owl-drawings-by-john-pusateri/

Presenting my Project: PowerPoint Presentation and Abstract

The final steps of this project include writing a short abstract summarizing what my project was about, its purpose and its findings for a school program and presenting a PowerPoint presentation to the BASIS community. My presentation was yesterday and I feel that I performed to the best of my abilities and all went well. For those who could not be present, here are the conclusions I drew from my experience over these past months.

I set out to answer a few questions. Namely, what meaning feathers had to Native Americans today, if Native Americans and Native wildlife needs were met by current laws and finally, my main question was whether or not repositories could improve.

I found that as spiritual revivals of old customs and ceremonies grew in popularity, the demand for feathers dramatically rose. High demands resulted in longer waiting list times for repositories, leaving Native Americans without necessary feathers for months or even years. My research into ceremonies that use feathers has shown that home blessing ceremonies, coming of age celebrations, marriage ceremonies and graduation ceremonies all require feathers at a fixed point in time. Couple this with successful pesticide bans like DDT, many bird populations are currently flourishing. This results in anger directed at repositories.

Solutions to this problem are simple. Open more repositories in different geographical areas to lessen waiting lists and develop more lenient laws regarding found feathers. Also, start a very limited hunting permit program for Native American tribesmen. Finally, be patient. As bird populations increase, more feathers will come available.

CG