Korina Bailey

Good day, people of this world (or not, I don't judge or discriminate). My name is Korina Bailey. I'm a senior at BASIS Scottsdale, and I'm well-known for my sarcasm and obsessions with various TV shows and movies (you'll learn which ones as I tend to write with many gifs), and I'm partially a very awesome person, so this adventure should be fun!

Anyway, some background before we delve into the amazingness of my blog. In my school, seniors have these thingymajigs called Senior Projects (click the link to learn more), where we take our third trimester off to intern/volunteer/work at a certain...place, depending on what one is interested in.

As I love animals, I chose to intern at Liberty Wildlife, a rehabilitation center for injured or infant wild animals. I'd like to give a huge thank you to my faculty adviser Ms. Mandigo and my on-site mentor Ms. Suits for helping me get this amazing opportunity!! Also, before I continue, let me tell you now that I will not be studying elephants or anything related to elephants, because I know my blog title may cause some misunderstandings. If my lack of elephants disappoints you, I sincerely apologize and advise you to stop reading now. Okay, back to my work at Liberty Wildlife. I plan to study the relationship between human's impact on the environment and wild animal's behavior as they adapt to the human's changes. To put it more fancily, "How do humans inadvertently influence animal’s behavior and what can be done to lessen our impact?"

Okay, I realize this question is really vague, but I do intend to choose a specific species to study (probably some bird), depending on which species is more likely to be admitted into Liberty Wildlife during my third trimester. From there, I'll do research on how those animals behave in the wild, what habitat they live in, etc. and then observe the injured animal's behavior and compare the wild's and injured's behavior. Keep in mind, the animals brought into Liberty Wildlife are those who have NOT successfully adapted to the changes humans made on their environment. Anyway, things will happen and I will write about them here, so be sure to read my blog, that is, if you're interested in those things.

Oh, and before I go, you may notice a poll on the right called "Next Week's Background." One of my friends Nicole gave me an amazing idea to change my blog's background every week (because I'm indecisive and can't choose just one animal), so vote or comment below on which animal you'd like to see next, and I'll change the picture and say something interesting about the animal.

For example, this bird is the Victoria Crowned Pigeon.

Hi, I'm a bird.

A fun fact (if it's not fun, pretend it is): Apart from looking amazing, they are the largest species of pigeon in the world (about the size of a turkey), so cool, right?

Anyway, that's all for now. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, just reply below and I'll get back to you once and if I can.

Have a nice life, and always look both ways before crossing a street.

Owl Never Forget You

Hey everyone!

This is my (technically) last blog post describing my research at Liberty Wildlife! This happens to fit very well with the fact that I apparently won Blog of the Week, so thanks to everyone who helped make this project and blog appear successful to everyone else (just kidding, you guys are all amazing)!

So, what do I have prepared for you today? Truthfully, not much (I know, what a great way to finish my blogging era). I spent a lot of this week working on my PowerPoint, which you guys can't see as it does not accurately represent the amazingness of my project, and planning my final product (another hint: I'm going to be building things). Tuesday really was just playing around with PowerPoint things, but Wednesday we got 30 animals brought in, so I was the busiest I've ever been. Why was it the busiest? Well, it's Spring, so 'tis the season when baby birds fall out of their nests and people bring them to us, including baby sparrows, grackles, starlings, doves, and the occasional cactus wren. Sorry, I don't have pictures because I was so busy, but I promise next week to take a bunch to put in the Final Post tab. Thursday was basically me frantically working to fix my PowerPoint (because you know, I tend to procrastinate sometimes), but once I have my final draft ready to go, I'll put a link of the presentation on this blog, so feel free to check it out once you're free.

Some of you could be asking, what now? I'd want to say, not really sure, I can't predict the future, but in a much more real sense, I'd say that now I have to work on my presentation skills (yay formal public speaking) and finish my final product. Additionally, since I'm going to continue volunteering at Liberty Wildlife, I can continue to collect any data that'll help with me with my analysis.

Now, for my last superstar animal of the week, the capybara!!!

Here's a capybara with a scarlet ibis.

I chose to put this one on the poll because I was able to personally work with one at the zoo, and also I was running out of ideas.
Anyway, capybaras are semi-aquatic mammals, and live much of their life next to a source of water.

1) They have webbed feet, and can stay underwater for up to 5 minutes.
2) They are also the largest rodent in the world.
Because Easter is this Sunday, 3) Since their meat can be consumed during lent, capybaras are eaten more before Easter.

Thanks so much for following my blog, guys! I'm sorry if my research was less spectacular than what you were expecting, but I tried?

Here's your complimentary life hack that you can do if you really want to:

If you ever have a lunch thief, secure your lunch with a padlock! 

Good luck to all your future endeavors, and have a nice life!

I was waiting so long to use this gif!

I'm Running Out of Animal Puns: A Huge Cat-astrophe

Hello humans (I assume many of you are humans, that is).

This is kind of a creepy gif, but oh well.

YOU GUYS, THERE'S ONLY ONE WEEK LEFT. IT'S SO CRAZY; I FEEL LIKE TIME RAN AWAY TOO QUICKLY AND NOW I HAVE TO DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH MY LIFE.

So, to answer that life question in a short-term manner, I've realized that I loved my time at Liberty Wildlife and I didn't want to leave, so I've chosen to spend the rest of my Wednesdays as a volunteer, where I will probably be doing mostly intake and help around (so, basically the same as what I'm doing now).

I really don't have much to talk about in this post: my main task this week involved my final product, which I can't tell you about, so there's a bunch of curiosity for you. However, to keep you updated, it seems that studying and presenting about two different species is quite a lot, so for my presentation and the rest of my project, I've decided to focus on my work for the American Kestrels because I've found more studies related to them and their population is declining sharply (even though they are still considered least concern by EPA), so hopefully my research will be able to see why they're population is declining and what humans can do to fix that little problem there.

This will hopefully be me soon?

Okay, so now to my next topic: what did I do this week? Tuesday, I did the same old- intake and research. Wednesday: I was able to work with some more bunnies (seriously guys, we must have like 40 cottontails right now. 95% are infants or juveniles). I also worked more on my final product (hint: there was a lot of sketching and measuring involved). Let's see, and on Thursday, we got totally slammed with so many animals- there were rabbits, doves, a great horned owls infant, and a gila mockingbird that got stuck in its nest (which meant I had to carefully untangle its feet from the twigs so we could look at it).

Finally, time for our animal of the week: the bee hummingbird!

It's so pretty!

That is the hummingbird's nest. For comparison. 

So, a very fun fact: this is in fact the smallest bird in the world. The entire world.
Mass: 0.056 – 0.071 oz (Adult)
Length: 2 – 2.4 in. (Adult)
On average, the bee hummingbird beats it wings 80 times a second. However, during courtship rituals, it can go up to 200 beats a second.
Finally, because this bird is so small and has a very fast metabolism, this bird eats up to half its body mass in food each day, and consumes up to 8 times its body mass in water.

Well, that's it for now. One more week guys. Then I'll be done with life. I know mocks and work and college are killing most of you right now, so I will encourage you with statements of encouragement: you can do it, you got this, and don't die!

And for all you students out there:

Use this trick to make the teacher think
you are studying
when you are really eating spaghetti

Have a nice life!

A Paw-sitively Perfect Post (Kind of)

Hello everyone!

I am so, so sorry for the late post. I've been having a lot of technical difficulties, but I finally got my other laptop back from the Geek Squad, and everything is good as new! So we're safe.
Anyway, can you believe we're already done with Week 8? That means there's only two more weeks of my on-site internship. Time is going by way too quickly, but as much as I love my internship here, I need a small break, as I'm sure you all do too (I hope school isn't killing you too much).

I'll try to keep this post short and sweet. I know a lot of you have been worrying about the Great Horned Owls, because I really haven't talked about them lately (kestrels are just so interesting!). So, to keep you updated, I have in fact been researching the owls some more. I've found that owls are also changing their nesting habits. If you remember from like 5 posts ago, owls don't make their own nests, but rather take others (usually red-tailed hawks) or find a crevice somewhere. It's a rather detailed study, but to sum it up, "urban owl nests had significantly lower site basal area, higher conifer composition, and lower shrub cover. Both urban and rural owl nests showed lower canopy cover and closer proximity to forest edge, paved roads, human habitation, and water than random sites" [Smith 2012]. So, it looks like owls nesting behavior is also changing due to urbanization. Yay, research!

Now, as much as I would love to inform you about my work on the kestrels, most of it now is related to my final product, and I really wanted to keep that a surprise until presentation day, By my calculations, this product is going to take a lot of work and I need to make sure that it's successful before I start raising people's expectations. 

Okay, I promised a shorter post, and I'm going to try really hard to fulfill that. Next on the discussion list is my week at Liberty Wildlife. To be honest, I pretty much forgot everything I did (my friends call me a Dory). I'm sure most of it was either research or intake, but there was this one time where I got to help feed the infant bunnies (because we have like 30 cottontail rabbits now so it takes a long time to feed them and give them their medicine). On Thursday, I remember I couldn't find my on-site mentor, so I ended up going around the whole education trail (where they keep the birds they use for presentations and tours), so I got to meet some new friends! 

Apology: the pictures are bad because there's a mesh cage messing up everything, so I'm sorry.

A Bald Eagle

A Turkey Vulture
(Whose name is Bailey)
(Which is my last name if you don't remember)

A Female American Kestrel
Looking up at the sky dramatically

A Male American Kestrel
Who is really fluffy and cute

Now, time for the animal of the week, the Luzon Bleeding Heart Pigeon!

Hi, I'm a bird. Tweet tweet.

So, if you weren't already aware, the Bleeding Heart Pigeon got its name because of the dark red spot right in the middle of its chest. This bird actually prefers to stay on the ground, and only leaves it to begin nesting. In fact, if approached by a predator, the pigeon will actually run away instead of flying away. I tried to look more into this, like why do they choose not to fly and how fast can they run, but apparently these birds are "elusive" and "shy", so not many have actually recorded this kind of information. Oh well, maybe that can be someone else's senior project.

These birds also mate for life (for some reason, we've been choosing a lot of animals that mate for life). 

Finally, these birds will often fake injuries to lure predators away from their nests, which I guess is really brave of them, but seeing as their main predators are birds of prey, crocodiles, snakes, and monkeys, this can also be really dangerous. Well, I'm sure they know what they're doing.

That sums it up for this week! If you have anything to say to me, comment below. If you don't have anything nice to say to me, best to say nothing at all. Or lie. Have a nice life, and don't let the schoolwork get you down!

This is how you win the lottery.

A Panda-monic Week

Hello living creatures! 

How are you today? I got some pictures and lots of words for you, so let's just dive right into it! 

Okay, so on Tuesday, not much stuff happened. This was the day where I was probably most productive in my research. I wanted to continue studying any possible patterns that could be related to the kestrels abandoning their nests, so I looked at the average temperatures in Arizona of the last ten years. I also further analyzed how kestrels diets can change in urban setting compared to in the wild. The most noticeable thing I've found is the type of insects and rodents they eat due to the food's availability in the area. This could be significant because each insect would give the bird different nutrients, and some insects may have more protein or be easier for the kestrel to digest, so I think my next move is to learn if there's a type of "selection process" that birds have when choosing what to eat and how each food affects the bird. While doing this, I will also look into a new thing: man-made kestrel nests. Apparently, there's this new thing going around (really, just look it up online and it'll be everywhere) where people make nests for the kestrels out of boxes or something and use this to study kestrels or something of that sort. Anyway, I want to see how this impacts the bird's behavior, so that'll be fun to look at. That was Tuesday at my internship. 

However, Tuesday night, after fulfilling my duty as a waitress, I was called by my Girl Scouts troop leader (who was apparently reading my blog) about a wild cotton tail that her friend has found. Liberty's kind of a long drive, so instead of the friend driving up to Liberty the next day, I picked up the rabbit that night. I realized when I got to the friend's house that this rabbit was about five days old, so I had to rush to Safeway at like 10PM to get some goat milk to feed to the baby bunny. 

That night, I woke up every two hours to make sure the bunny was doing okay and that my homemade incubator was still working. I loved this experience because I had to research behavior in cottontails to learn how best to look after the baby. However, I ended up getting way too attached to it (and you know, the feeling was mutual. Whenever I put my hand in the box to get the bunny so I could warm it up or feed it, it crawled into my hand (which made my heart melt)), which made letting it go just that much harder. Anyway, in the end I had to give the bunny to Liberty (even though like 95% of me was screaming to keep it) because I knew that this was best for everyone (and my parents flatly rejected my idea for the new pet). So, that was that. The bunny experience also took up basically my entire Wednesday too, so the main things I did on Wednesday at Liberty was intake again. 

Look, it's so tiny and small and cute!!!

Finally, Thursday!!  So, this was kind of a weird day. For some reason, there was like some mosquito or something hanging out at my desk, because I got like ten bug bites in the first hour.

Basically me

Of course, I'm used to bug bites after growing up in Arkansas, but I still got really agitated and itchy, so for the remainder of my shift, I tried to avoid my desk as much as possible. This led me to get a personal tour of our new orphan care that recently opened (this is where newborn to juvenile birds get brought in) which was tons of fun. Also, I ended spending a lot of time with the American Kestrels and Great Horned Owls we had in rehab. This was particularly interesting because I was able to analyze each bird's behavior towards humans. If you remember from my last post, I said that the kestrels were "human-tolerant," which many of you had questions about. Basically, one of the top "statistical" ways to study the amount of "human-tolerance" an animal has (especially for a bird) is by how close you can get to it before it begins to panic and try to escape. Well, I experienced this first-hand when I was able to sit with the kestrels for a while (I wanna say about 30 minutes to an hour) without them caring at all. Literally, they just continued either eating, taking naps, or they just simply stared at me (which was the most "aggressive" response I got). However, the Great Horned Owls did not like me one bit. They gave me death glares; one owl got all puffed up to make it seem bigger (a classic defensive behavior), and two owls repeatedly clicked their beaks at me.

This is actually a puffed up Barn Owl,
but it was doing the same thing the GHO was.

I could tell that I agitated them, so I left pretty quickly, but I loved the differences between the two. Now, the problem with this observation is that the owls may just not have liked me (instead of humans in general) or perhaps there was some outside factor that I didn't take into account. So I tried. 

The California Condor.
Another animal I saw when I escaped my desk.

Okay, so usually I'd end off with my animal of the week....but, well, um, that's not gonna happen today? 

You see, because I got so busy (by busy, I'm mostly blaming the rabbit) I totally forgot to create a new poll for my next background until like Wednesday night, which unfortunately does not give you people enough time to vote. So, I can either give you guys another week, or I can talk about three different animals because at the moment the votes give me a three-way tie. Well, I'm selfish and lazy, so I chose the former option. Sorry. Really, I am. Please forgive me. Don't boycott my blog. I at least gave you some cute bunny pictures? Well, on that awkward note, I'm gonna quickly scamper away before there's like some big angry mob with torches and pitchforks. 

A tribute to the new Beauty and the Beast film 

Have a nice life, and here's your useless life advice for the week!

A Slighty A-Moose-ing, Slightly Hawk-ward Post

Hello one and all!

Welcome back to this blog! I hope you had a great spring break, and for those who did not have a spring break, I hope you've been having a great life! Let me tell you, adjusting back to my work at Liberty Wildlife was time-consuming. I had to read all my documents and notes over again to remember what I wanted to work on, and then I also had less time for research because I was helping around the site more, so this whole week is pretty much a big blob of blurriness. That being said, I'll try to make this post interesting, but I'm not sure how much I can actually report on about my research.

So, for starters, if you remember from last week (or the week before last week), I talked about general behavior in wild American Kestrels. One thing I said was how kestrels go back to the same nesting site every year, which I thought was really cool (obviously there is something very important about the nesting site then, so keep that in mind when I bring up my next point). It's known that the kestrels are now a "human-tolerant" species, which means they've become more comfortable living in urban areas around humans, and have adapted to meet all their necessities in these environments. However, recent studies have been done that show kestrels living specifically in urban areas are abandoning their nests.

A link to one study is here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12103/full

A fun statistic:
36% of kestrel nesting attempts failed and 88% of failures occurred during incubation. Kestrels nesting in higher disturbance areas were 9.9 times more likely to fail than kestrels nesting in lower disturbance areas. Habitat and clutch initiation date did not explain reproductive outcome.

(Also, side note: my laptop was "confiscated" by the Geek Squad because I foolishly unconsciously decided I wanted to see what would happen if I spilled water on my keyboard (answer: nothing good), so I lost all my bookmarks and downloads that I saved for this project....so I'm sorry. I'm using an old laptop right now, but I'll be getting the one that actually has things on it back in about two weeks.)

Okay, back to other things. So, kestrels are abandoning their nests when they should not be doing that. Why? Well, this is something that I do plan to go further into. One of the spectacular things about animal behavior is that most things are never known for sure. It's a lot of logical analysis with some speculation and much observation, but we can't really go up to the animal and ask them, "Why do you do what you do?" so we're stuck with what we got. So, you know, that's unfortunate, but oh well. My hypothesis for now is that this new change has something to do with their finicky diet (so they either might be hunting someplace far from the nest to get the food they need or they could be actually getting hurt from the diet they are forced to have in the city) or (and especially in Arizona) the kestrels might be abandoning the nests in the city because it gets too hot and kestrels (though they can live in the desert) have their limits just like us.

Yeah, so expect that one day. Goodness, I can't believe it's already Week 6. We've reached and crossed the halfway point, and there is no looking back. I miss things already. No, enough sadness, let's talk about my week, because everyone wants to hear about that!

So basically we got some new animals this week. For some weird reason, there was a huge influx in hummingbirds this week, so I don't know what going on with those guys out there, but it seems they need some assistance with their lives. Here's some pictures of the hummingbirds and a hatchling hummingbird:

This little guy's head is up to show that it's hungry
Also, they're supposed to look like that.
Don't worry.

We also got a juvenile owl brought in and it was super fluffy, so that was tons of fun.

CC: Pieter Mead
Fun Fact: Apparently, he also went to
BASIS Scottsdale in middle school,
so random coincidences there.

Now time for our animal of the week: the pangolin!!!

This animal is absolutely adorable. And it's the only mammal covered in scales (fun fact #1) . 

2) The scales are made of keratin, just like our finger nails, and make up 20 per cent of their body weight.

3) The mammal can consume up to 20,000 ants a day. 

4) Pangolins can close their ears and nostrils using strong muscles. This helps protect them from ant attacks. 

5) They have long, sticky tongues, which are often longer than their body and attached near its pelvis and last pair of ribs. If a pangolin fully extends its tongue, it is longer than the animal’s head and body! I mean, I can't even touch my nose with my tongue, so this is pretty impressive for me. 

6) Pangolins don't have teeth, so they can’t chew. Instead, they have keratinous spines in their stomach and swallow stones that help them grind up their food in much the same manner as a bird’s gizzard.

(Brought to you by "9 Amazing Pangolin Facts" on Wildlife WorldWide)

There ya go!! A bunch of stuff to keep you satisfied for the week. I hope you enjoyed my post, but if you didn't, I apologize greatly and I'll do better next time. For now, have a nice life, and here's some bad advice that you should not take seriously please (I can't afford to buy you a new phone): 

Magnify your phone's screen by putting it in a glass of water!

Okay, now I'm really done.

As Lazy as a Sloth

Hi guys!

This is just an FYI post reminding you I'm on (or I guess was now) on Spring Break, so sorry if you were confused by the absence of the post. Some of you may be asking, "Korina, what did you do during Spring Break?"

What I wanted to be doing

Well, I wish my answer was more fun. I ended up going to my new job as a waitress nearly every day, so yay money, but no relaxation. Oh well, money's more important. I also volunteered at the Phoenix Zoo, where I looked after the injured or quarantined animals and prepared diets for an abundance of animals all over the zoo. Yeah, that's about all I got for you now.

I will be going back to Liberty Wildlife this week, so stay tuned on whatever I find out! If you have any questions about anything animal-related or me-related, just comment below and I'll get back to you soon!