St. Paul Seabird Camp starts next week, and students and leaders are busy preparing. The two interns have started work, and Ram and students have been busy doing prep-work on costumes for a seabird theatre production planned for the end of camp.
We’ll be posting daily updates during camp, but here is a quick update and a few photos from the start of this week:
On Monday, Ashley and Alexia helped with the rebuild of last year’s seabird masks used during the 4th July parade. The masks are getting new beaks and new paint jobs! The girls also got messy doing some paper mache on this year’s new creations. Work continued on building more armatures for our masks.
On Tuesday, both of our interns started work! Intern Marjorie and her friend Heather had a brief drawing lesson and then got started creating seabird artwork on tote bags. The rest of the kids will paint on these totes during seabird camp, using Marjorie and Heather’s drawings to help them along.
Our other intern, Chauncey, accompanied Veronica and Misty from the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) to SW Point to capture song birds to take samples that will later be examined for plastics contaminants along with the seabird samples being collected. Unfortunately it was a very windy day and the birds avoided the mist net. Veronica also introduced Chauncey to the various lichen species that they will be collected throughout the summer. Look for more first hand accounts as Seabird camp continues.