My Essential Questions:

• How does treatment differ for different types of animals, wild and domestic, and how do you learn what types of treatment techniques are best?
• How can shadowing a professional veterinarian help me to better understand wildlife rehabilitation and release?
• How can learning the best methods to use when caring for injured/sick wildlife, help me to better care for animals on my farm (chickens, geese, sheep, and wild animals), especially since vets aren’t trained to support long-term health?

1. How are you exploring your essential question; is it different from what you expected? If you don’t feel like you’re answering your essential question, what is happening that’s different from what you expected?

So far in my senior project, I have been able to start to answer my first essential question (which is how treatment differs for different animals), but I do think it has shifted slightly from different types of animals to different types of birds. I’ve been learning how to treat injures in owls, hawks, and other kinds of birds, and even if the injuries are similar, depending on the animal the treatment is very different. I think I’ll be able to answer my second question in the coming weeks when my senior project is over since it does require more experience to be able to answer. Finally, my third question relates more to how I can use the information from the internship on my own animals on the farm so I also think I’ll have to wait and accumulate information on how to treat certain bird injures, and then test out what I have learned on my farm animals.

2. Are you surprised by any of the challenges that you’ve faced so far? How have you met those challenges and what can you do going forward to deal with them?

I think one challenge I’ve encountered is really planning what I have to document/record and know what it is I’m going to want to have once these experiences are over. Sometimes I’m doing something and in the moment I don’t feel like I need to record everything I’m doing because I’m experiencing it in the present moment, but later I want to have a record of that moment. Remembering to document and record these experiences is definitely something I need to focus on.

3. Writing on your essential question: What have you learned about your essential question so far? What further questions do you have? and/or Has your essential question changed? If so, how?  What do you want to know more about?

Like I said in response to the first question I do think my first essential question should only be about how treatments differ for different types of birds and not animals in general. Specifying and narrowing in this essential question will help me focus on how to approach answering it during the rest of the time I have for my senior project. I have started to learn specific injuries that have affected different kinds of birds and the very different approaches to treatment based on the type of bird affected. I want to continue learning about the types of injuries and comparing differing treatments especially in owls and hawks.