Just thought I'd update the blog with what we are doing these days!  We've been polishing our kits and continuing contact and field work with the Zoo.  Right now is finals time, so it's a bit hectic for all our members.

Presentations are just about perfected now, and we are looking into new mediums of awareness raising, as well as a wider audience for our presentations.

Today we started organizing our school presentations, setting target schools and also a target audience for our presentations.  We decided to focus mainly on local schools as students here will be more likely to experience the impacts from burrowing owl population decline and more directly relate to it, and we chose students as our audience because they will be the future leaders that will decide environmental issues like burrowing owl conservation.  It is imperative that they are informed early on so that they will make the correct decisions in the future.  Hopefully, they will catch onto our infectious passion and love of these birds and maybe involve themselves in a project like ours in the future.  Who knows?  It might not be directly related to burrowing owls, but maybe they will be inspired to go out and make a difference in their community as well, and impact the world in some way.

We made a list of people to contact at each school and assigned different group members different schools to contact.  We spaced the jobs out evenly so some people contacted schools and others focused on polishing the presentations.

Merry belated Christmas everyone!  We met today again since it's conveniently winter break to continue creating our online educational game.  There was considerable debate over how and what to include.  The outcome of our meeting:

1. Educational "Choose Your Own Adventure" game that will have various paths players can choose in different situations, one of which will lead to success
2. Knowledge to incorporate at each step might include owl diet, habitat, causes of death, and predators
3. We will be crafting our game using a Webs website

We also started really creating the game today, loading pictures onto the site and drafting some quick information to include and steps.

We have just begun writing articles for publication in both print and online publication.  We found out today about our local science journal, CATALYST's article deadline, which is in just a few days.  This is an opportunity for spreading the word about burrowing owls across the nation, because CATALYST will be placing this issue on a national publication website for the entire US to see, as well as distributing within our community.

As we mentioned above, the submission deadline is soon, so we've got to work fast to make it in time.  We're hoping this article gets the attention of all the local high school students so they will understand the plight of the burrowing owl!

We coordinated meetings this month so we could practice all our parts together.  We tried to split up parts based on each member's strengths and preferences, though the Project Manager, Alice Wu, decided that everyone had to practice every part of the presentation so splitting would be easier, and also in case someone didn't show up for one of his/her assigned presentations.  Then there would be three other people who could take over the part, leaving the presentation still intact and flowing.

However, we also practiced for presentations in presentation groups, coordinating the groups so absences will have minimal impacts on the presentations' quality and effectiveness.  At the same time, any surprise absences shouldn't affect the presentations too much since everyone knows all parts of the speech and information to include.

We've all moved up a grade since last year, and our work load has definitely changed.  Lately we've all been especially busy, and while burrowing owls were still in the backs of our minds, we haven't really sat down to discuss our project until today.

Because we haven't met for so long, we immediately began working when we walked into the meeting.  Having identified the most feasible venues for spreading awareness about the burrowing owl, we began to create presentation reports.  We chose target schools and populations for our presentations and started coordinating dates and times, finding the available times and dates within our group, assigning schools to each person, and finally, beginning to communicate with the different schools.

Basically, we had liaisons for each school that were in charge of contacting the science teachers and individual grade level teachers for possible times and dates for us to present to the children and staff about our work and the importance of the burrowing owl in our community.  At the same time, we asked about the students' current learning material and agreed that we'd try to customize our presentations so they would relate to the curriculum.

This idea is taking shape even faster than our last idea did.  Maybe it's because we're more experienced as a group, or maybe it's our total lack of inhibition to dream big in this phase.  Whatever it is, our brainstorming session today was much more free than it was for Phase I.

We were having another casual conversation today, basically bouncing ideas off of each other.  We laughed and talked and scribbled furiously, getting every idea down, no matter how impossible it seemed.  Immediately, we took the more feasible ideas and started outlining their processes.

What we did today:

Planned educational presentations (dates and locations)
Outlined plans for making kits for different grades during presentations in schools and other educational venues

We spent a month in intense debate about feasible additional areas in which burrowing owls need help.  Finally one group member said that most people she spoke with didn't even know what burrowing owls were.  After working with them for so long, we didn't even consider that some wouldn't know much about burrowing owls, especially San Diegans.  But we remembered just how clueless we'd all been before starting this project too.  To change the law, we have to have a lot of people willing to support and speak up for burrowing owl conservation, and at that moment, there was no longer a question what our next topic would be.  We'd witnessed horrendous things as we'd rescued owls and squirrels these past few months, and it was apparent that the laws protecting burrowing owl habitats had to change.  And for that, we needed to raise awareness.  Thus, our next topic was born.

As it turns out, the process we used in the first part of our project was very similar to the steps outlined by the Future Problem Solving Program for approaching any issue.  With awareness as our focus, we set to work sketching out our method to increase it, referring occasionally to the FPS outline as well.

Our first idea was to create an interactive online game to educate people about owls' fates when they meet up with certain obstacles.  This time, we're going into our project with high hopes.

After another month of constant checking on our three preserves (we released a few more owls onto Daley Ranch Preserve later), our three new owl colonies have been deemed successful permanent colonies by our Zoo mentors!  This is, as mentioned in the previous post, one huge leap for the conservation of this species!  Hopefully this technique will be able to save even more owls in the future, and improved upon to be even more effective!

Today we finally got together to celebrate our successes and did research on more causes to add to the burrowing owl conservation theme!  We gathered more resources and research about the burrowing owl, consulted family and friends, and searched the internet and the library for extra information that may have been overlooked the first time.

Today we checked in quickly at the Otay Mesa and Sweetwater Preserves, where we have released 3 burrowing owl families onto each.  I nearly started crying from happiness when I saw their feathers inside the burrows and footprints around the entrances, as well as the glowing eyes of an owlet peering out curiously from within the depths of a burrow.  The families have actually settled in!  They plan to stay!

This is a monumental moment!  This is one of the first successes in the creation of permanent "artificial" colonies in the world!  This could be the beginning of a totally new chapter in these owls' lives, and a new chapter in the conservation of burrowing owls around the globe!  Maybe our ideas weren't quite so crazy after all... maybe, just maybe, we will encourage others to join us, and together we will bring this species back from the brink of extinction!