Thursday, June 12, 2008

Animal Observations At The Zoo

I am helping a friend out with her thesis at UAA on the behavioral patterns of captive polar bears, as opposed to behavioral patterns of wild polar bears. This basically means that I spend my Friday evenings observing Ahpun and Lyutyik, the two polar bears we have at the zoo.

On the one hand, I love to watch those two; they are such beautiful animals (I’m slightly biased, but not much). On the other hand, it’s quite boring just sitting there. It’s cold, it’s uncomfortable, it’s buggy…

I have a stop-watch that beeps at me every 15 seconds. I sit and watch the bears and when the beep sounds, I write down exactly what they’re doing at that very minute.

I do this for 2 hours.

Even worse, my friend does this for 8 hours, 7 days a week!

This is why I’m helping her: she’s exhausted!

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