Boids!

You know you work for the park service when you open the freezer in the break room and find a dead bird in a plastic baggie.  I think it might have been a Common Poorwill, but I can’t be sure.  I’m not much of a birder.

But we have lots of birders visit the parks and they’re a special breed (Heh.  I made a funny).  I had one supervisor who was really awesome at identifying birds, like, he was all Audubon Society and everything.  He could see a bird 5,000 feet overhead and say, “Why, look!  It’s a Golden-Crested Eye Gouger.”

I was pleased with myself when I could identify a loon.

I had one guy who actually came in to ask me what kind of bird crap he saw on a rock.  Based on the description all I could say was, “Uh, maybe a turkey vulture..or a Peregrine falcon?  Well, it sounds like it was something pretty big.”

One day, we had a visitor who said he heard that there was an American Woodcock in someone’s yard in park housing and he wanted to see it.  I informed him that we didn’t allow park guests to invade employee privacy by going into people’s yards to look for birds.

Speaking of woodcocks, I’m starting to realize that I spent way too much time working in male dominated professions.  It took everything I had to stifle my laughter as someone repeatedly talked about bushtits at the front counter one afternoon.