Sad Goodbyes....

In just over 12 hours I will be leaving San Juan Island. Hopefully I won't be leaving forever, but it could turn out that way. I'm really going to miss it!

I don't know that much exciting stuff happened over my last two days of work... We didn't get any new seals in. They did get a bald eagle in today! Unfortunately, with a broken clavicle and injured eye, there wasn't anything to be done for it and it had to be euthanized.

I had an interesting experience during the midnight seal feed on Saturday night, though. Everything seemed to be going fine initially. I got all the food ready, fed Concho and Wolf with no trouble, and had just finished feeding Ocelot. I was getting ready to fix her warm compress (she gets a hot towel under her belly after her feeds to try and help with her bloating issues) when all the lights in the seal nursery went out - the fuse had blown. I had to call the on-call staff member (I felt really bad for waking her up!) to find out where the fuse box was. On my way out of the nursery, however, I noticed that the gate next to the building was open. This gate is normally closed. I hadn't noticed whether it was closed when I first went out to the nursery, but I had assumed it was, so it was very disconcerting to discover it wide open!! It led my overactive imagination to start wondering whether there could be someone lurking in the dark, watching me feed the seals and clean syringes. It was very creepy! So I had to finish up all my tasks with the eerie idea that there could be someone else around when I was supposed to be alone. At any rate, I managed to get the lights working again and had just finished cleaning when the fuse blew again. I switched it back on and proceeded to wash the dishes, as usual. By the time I finished, the fuse had blown a third time!!! I switched it back on and had to just hope for the best, that it wouldn't blow again sometime during the night and leave the seals that still need heat lamps to slowly get colder and colder. (I don't think it blew again, which was a blessing!) It was an interesting night, to say the least!

Other than that, Sunday and Monday were both fairly uneventful, animal-wise! Nukupu'u showed how precocious and wonderful she is - she ate the fish that got put into her bath on Monday. According to Penny, seals as young as she is normally don't eat their fish. All I could say was, "That's my girl!" It's funny, but the interns all feel rather more attached to "our" seals, the ones that we individually named, than to the others, like parents with children or (some) people with their pets.

On Monday night, though, all the interns and Tristen went out to one of the beaches for a campfire. We roasted hot dogs, made biscuits-on-a-stick, made s'mores, and had ice cream and chips and other delicious junk foods. We also saw tons of stars, including a few shooting stars. I actually saw the Milky Way! I've only ever been able to see it once before, when I visited Arizona several years ago. I think most places in North Carolina, at least that I've been too, are either too hazy (with humidity or smog) or too close to large, light-polluting cities, or possibly both, to really be able to see the stars clearly. It was a pretty cool evening.

If you want to see more pictures that I've taken, be sure to check back in about a week! I'm planning to post them online, and as I put them up I'll post links to the albums on this blog. Thanks to everyone who read, and especially to those who commented!