Today, however, it was time to clean the eagle cage. For those of you who haven't been to Hallam Lake, our resident eagle spends most of her days outside, on a grassy mound. At night she moves to a large enclosure, with a smaller wooden box inside of it that is open on one side. She spends much of her time inside of this protected space, and so it gets quite filthy. She definitely does not follow the rule of not pooping where you eat!
Cleaning the eagle cage is a pretty involved process. First, I have to get dressed for it. Luckily, we keep a spare pair of clothes just for this purpose.... Not sure how old they are, but they do the trick!
The next step is protective goggles and rubber gloves. I also like to cinch down the hood on my jacket so that no splatter gets on my hair!
The best part of cleaning the eagle cage is climbing up into the wooden box. I feel vaguely like an eagle up there, except that I'm definitely a lot bigger than she is.
Here I am in the eagle cage...
I realize this starts my blogging career off on a little bit of a gross note, but such is the life of a naturalist-- we never quite know what's in store for the day! While it really is one of the best jobs ever, today I was more or less a janitor. Can't wait to find out what tomorrow has in store!
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