today was my first day doing the 'alala routine. unfortunately as i got out my camera to take pictures i realized i had left the battery sitting on the charger. :[ sorry guys!! i will definitely take pictures of everyone next time i'm on routine although i don't think it's for another week. let me tell you about how awesome these birds are though. they are extremely intelligent and very curious birds. one of them, niele (pronounced ne-aylay) is by far the sweetest bird i've met. she unfortunately is a feather picker and cannot fly because she intentionally breaks all of her wing feathers off when she molts them in, but she can hop better than a kangaroo. she hops from perch to perch all over the ceiling which is about 20 feet up and back down to the floor. today when i went in to clean her enclosure she hopped down to the ground and followed me around for a while making cute little cooing noises and nibbling on my clothes. now i know this isn't something we really want to see from any of these birds because the ultimate goal would be to build up a steady enough population for them to be released. but, i can't help but have my heart go out to the sweet little crow who welcomed me into her life without any questions. it makes me so sad to think there are only 50 of these wonderful birds left and only POSSIBLY two of them are left in the wild. in fact, after reading seeking the sacred raven by mark jerome walters (which i encourage all of you to go read - you can borrow my copy if you want) i learned a lot about the struggle people have made to keep these crows around after everything we did to bring them to the brink of extinction. it really is a tragic book about dashed hopes and birds that didn't make it, but despite it all they're hanging in there and hopefully someday we can have them flying free in kona again.

in other news, something very exciting happened to me today. we have had a "wild" male nene that has decided to come and visit us for the past couple weeks which is pretty cool. we named him vermont because his state band letters are VT. unfortunately he is totally stressing out our captive nene because he stands right outside the pens near where the females are sitting on eggs or goslings. this of course makes the parents very nervous and they try to attack him to get him away but can't reach him. so, today we decided we'd better catch him up and have the u.s. fish and wildlife service come pick him up and take him back to the other side of haleakala where he should be. three of us surrounded him and thanks to my massive amount of bird catching experience at liberty i snagged him. i just held my first nene gosling yesterday and today i got to hold an adult, better yet, a wild adult! it was really awesome to see him up close. he's so much smaller than the canada geese i'm used to and the feathers on his neck really do have strange but beautiful patterns in them. also, their feet have much less webbing and spikier claws than normal geese because they are converted for walking on volcanic rock. i know i sound like a nerd, but it was awesome to see all of this up close. i even helped clean up a small abrasion he had on his left wing tip (see how much liberty has taught me!). so, all in all, my day was quite exciting! i will now go curl up with the hawaiian honeycreepers by h. douglass pratt that i borrowed from the bird library here and learn about the amazing adaptive radiation of honeycreepers on these isles (p.s. if you have a spare $190 lying around you can feel free to buy it for me. just kidding!). so enjoy the pictures of vermont while he was still roaming the property and send him good wishes for his travels home tomorrow!