28 Jul Bird Walking and Settling In

Since my last blog, I’ve settled into this internship much more, making big progress in planning a walk of my own, as well as completing other tasks, going on walks, and getting to know my coworkers Evelyn, Sean, and now Nick, better. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend a second bird walk with Dave last week, due to having had my wisdom teeth removed the prior day, but thankfully I’ve since then recovered enough to work in-person again.

Planning my Bird Walk

For my accessible bird walk, I’ve been planning it to be oriented towards people with vision disabilities. Because of that, I’ve had to choose a location that would be easy and flat to navigate, while also being heavy in other sensory experiences, such as things to touch and birdcalls to listen to. While searching through the Boulder County accessible trails booklet, I came across the Ute Sensory Trail, located on Flagstaff Summit. This is a short loop that is meant to be experienced without sight, with touch-based signs, and braille translations for all of the text. It seemed promising, so on Wednesday I spent a couple hours determining its accessibility, using the Birdability checklist. In terms of accessibility, ignoring the difficult drive up to Flagstaff Summit, the area scored very high, and so I decided that it would be the location of my bird walk. The only issue that was left was how short the Sensory loop was, being about 1/10th of a mile. I wasn’t sure if that would be enough, so I decided to follow the Ute trail itself to see if it would be accessible enough for people with vision disabilities. To my surprise, the trail stayed well maintained and accessible for another half-mile, and led to a clearing in a grove of old growth pines that I felt would be perfect to take the participants of my walk to. With the route decided, now I have to prepare a script, choose a date, and practice my walk with the help of others, and the vision disability simulation glasses that we have at the office.

Attending Sean’s Walk

On Thursday, I drove up to Longmont to attend Sean’s bird walk, at Sandstone Ranch park. Though the walk was short, Sean did a good job of leading the walk and showcasing the local birds, and we even spotted a nest. Along with that, I was able to meet many interesting new people, including our program’s newest intern, Nick, who had come up from Colorado Springs with his family to attend Sean’s walk.

Other tasks

On Monday, I met up with my coworkers, Evelyn and Sean, to work on a final presentation about birding and bird walks that we will be presenting to the rest of the office. Unfortunately, I was only able to stay for just under 2 hours, due to having New Student Oriention that same morning, but I was still able to make good progress on my slides, and was able to get to know my coworkers much better. Apart from that, during one of my solo bird walks, I was able to observe and photograph a large group of ducks, along with the usual Red-Winged Blackbirds and House Finches that live in the area.