Captain’s Log: 14 August 2013 (Day (-24))
Tickets secured for the trip from Quito to San Jose for December stay in Costa Rica. Anti-malarial drug prescription
for Ecuador placed as of yesterday. The Hennessy hammock remains next to the bedroom door frame, as it has for the past two months. The hospital internship at the National Aviary is inching towards its final days.
The launch draws near.
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| Yarina lodge in Ecuador, July 2007. |
When I planned my time abroad last fall, I was looking for
experiences that would place me in communities where the balance of
human-animal-environmental conflict was particularly evident. During a 2012
study abroad experience in Costa Rica with CIEE, I took a “Humans in the Tropics”
class which took us to places where that balance dictated life in vividly observable
ways. The agricultural lessons were
particularly memorable: streams of caramel-colored whey runoff fed into
streams, sluggish flows down lower montane-forest slopes congealing in
tadpole-heavy pools, coating the water’s edge and turning rancid in the tropic
heat. The black-thick smoke of oil palm plantations near the coast and the
workers’ tales of banana plant Fer-de-lance attacks. Ranchland in Santa Rosa
National Park giving way to secondary growth and the re-colonizers within:
Black Guans and White-faced Capuchins and scorpions with hundreds of
diamond-eyed babies on their backs; meandering anteaters and Gladiator tree
frogs in shower-drains. The lessons, in addition to those given to me by
veterinary researchers visiting my Oakland Zoo workplace in 2011, are what
magnetized me towards the growing field of conservation medicine.
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| National Aviary Hospital Internship, Summer 2013. |
So what exactly is conservation medicine? In 2004, a number of conservation-minded scientists, veterinarians, physicians, and other health professionals put forth the One Health Initiative: a proposal to increase interdisciplinary collaboration in studies of the relationship between human, animal, and environmental health. Conservation medicine can encompass any aspect of this relationship, be that ecosystem health, anthropogenic impacts on climate, wildlife disease ecology, zoonotic disease emergence and transmission, preventative veterinary medicine, public health, natural resource management, urban food and water safety...the list goes on. In this changing and ever-more interconnected world, the idea that the line between environmental and animal health lies on the same line as the health of our own species is an increasingly inescapable reality.
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| The National Aviary's Ornithologist Bob Mulvihill during the 2013 launch of Neighborhood Nestwatch in Pittsburgh, PA: a citizen science initiative through the Smithsonian Institute. |
In the future, I am hoping to approach the world with this same
broad-scale view as a veterinary researcher. Over the past four years, I have
been fortunate enough to work with globally-minded organizations such as Pomona
and the Claremont Colleges, CIEE: Tropical Ecology (Monteverde, Costa Rica),
the International Bird Rescue Center, the Oakland Zoo, and the National Aviary,
which have propelled me to apply in hopes of further education at institutions
such as the Veterinary University of California Davis School of Veterinary
Medicine and Tufts’ Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. In the interval
encompassing the admissions committee’s decision for veterinary classes of
2014, I will be traveling to Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Guatemala
to investigate community projects in wildlife rehabilitation, biodiversity mapping,
ecological health assessment, public health, and environmental education. For
the next near-year, I plan to keep this blog to update and educate my friends,
family, and previous or future colleagues about what I’m learning and doing
abroad. Additionally, I hope to foster connections between my past and
(hopefully) future workplaces. The possible expansion of the National Aviary’s
Andean Condor breeding program could be facilitated by a link to a release site
in Peru. Future education opportunities (such as those offered by CIEE) could be developed for for U.S. physicians, veterinarians, conservation biologists, and
their accompanying graduate students or interns along the Napo River in
Ecuador: they could learn about human communities and ecosystem health from local
specialists, and start to see firsthand what is needed to further conservation efforts worldwide. Anything to make the changes in our planet more
visceral, more tangible to those of us who live buffered from the effects of
our lifestyles on the non-homo-sapiens parts of the world.
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| CIEE's Tropical Ecology program in Costa Rica: pineapple production, spring 2013. |
During my last three weeks in Pittsburgh, PA, I will be collecting
veterinary and medical supplies to bring on my trip while I wrap up one of the
most intellectually stimulating and career inspiring summers to date. If you
would care to learn more or contribute, check out the links in the bar below
the blog header, or e-mail me at the following address:
I will update this blog with my progress and a profile of the
institutions I have worked and will work for before I leave on September 7th
for Ecuador.
Until then.
Until then.
-La chica de Buhos (Nikki Becich)
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| Me. |
