Pigeons are eejits.

Hiya!

Two weeks have gone by since I’ve been stuck at the airport for three extra hours. The job’s been fantastic, now that I know what to do around here on a daily basis. Nothing special has happened, all the hedgehogs are still cute jerks and the gulls are still smelly as hell. The day before yesterday was interesting, though. At eight in the evening, after a long day of work, my colleague came up to me and asked me if I wanted to go on a rescue with him. I consented, and we drove in the general direction of Glasgow. There was a swan in need of rescue on the M77. After driving around for a while, we finally found them, picked up the swan and drove back. The swan was surprisingly calm, and when we came to the main hospital and he was released out the swan-straightjacket, he just sat there. The next day, though, when I was working in the main hospital, it just kept blaring and blaring at me. Out of revenge, it even did one of the scare-poos swans do, straight out of the enclosure he was in. Three feet of clean floor turned green out of the blue. Swans are jerks.

But they’re not as bad as pigeons are. There are several pigeons in the main hospital, and we have four “special” cases. Two of them, quite juvenile, are in an enclosure together. When you open the door to change their food and water, they look as if they’ve seen a ghost. Their eyes follow your hands all the way to the back of the enclosure, but when you touch their food bowl they’ll start pecking at your hands. If you wiggle your fingers, though, it scares them so much they’ll take a poop right there on the spot. One of our other pigeons, an adult this time, has some identical crises. The way he behaves, he probably thinks he is a swan or goose, something big in any case. When you open his cage and reach for the food bowl, he puffs himself up and starts cooing in a very affronted way, like it’s trying to tell you that it’s an outrageous thing to try and top up his food bowl. The last pigeon is the worst of them all. He is just so horribly aggressive that he tries to eat your hands when you reach for the food bowl. He then keeps staring at you when you take care of the other birds, like he’s trying to tell you that he’ll keep an eye on you in case you’ll ever get close to him again.

The thing I came to love most in here are the adult foxes, the biggest failures of the trust. The reason they’re the biggest failure is because they’ve become tame. McDonald will come up to you and try to cuddle you. He so terribly curious of everything that he even sticks his nose in the poop bucket if you’re cleaning his enclosure. His girlfriend, Dora, is a wee bit more of a scaredy-cat. She’ll watch you for a while before she comes up to you, but once she’s used to you she’s every bit as lovely as McDonald is. The other two adult foxes we have are called Fred and George. Fred is a three-legged fox who is extremely curious but scared out of his mind of humans, and this conflicts. When you come into his enclosure, you can almost see the errors going on inside his head. He wants to come up to you to see what’s it all about, but at the same time he wants to stay as far away from you as possible. He solves this conflict by sticking his nose in his poop bucket, like McDonald does. George is just the biggest eejit I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen him eat out of the poop bucket and almost vomiting afterwards. Twice. He is lovely and beautiful, though..

Last night I was invited out to dinner by an acquaintance of mine. It was lovely, we went out to a restaurant called Asian Gourmet. The food was delicious, the servings were huge and their spring rolls are to kill for. Metaphorically.

And now for the school stuff:
I have learnt that pigeons are the biggest eejit birds possible.
I have also learnt that the people around here are very, very proud of their accent (which is fine, of course).
There are not many problems I come across, the biggest I had in the last few days was that I didn't understand the bus schedule properly and that I got lost in Beith. I solved both by asking around for explanations.
My list for this week:
Eejit (this is slang for idiot, I'll not put it in my portfolio but it's just such a fun word to say)
Presbytery
Whitling
Fottery
Serendipity
Siskin
Exacerbated


Cheers mates!