Forestry Lab

Today I went to Green Diamond for a Forestry lab. I was not really looking forward to it considering I have been sick since Friday and we would be hiking through the forest, however I realized that if I didn't go to the lab, I wouldn't be able to make it up. My roommate and i have the same lab so we reluctantly walked to where our class was going to meet and signed the waiver sheets and picked up our hard hats. We both didn't really know why we needed hard hats, but we took them anyway, and prepared ourselves for something we thought would be boring and tedious.

The bus ride was about thirty minutes long, and the first section of the lab did not disappoint. It was both boring and tedious. We were sitting listening to a man talk about how his small company allowed people to come and cut down certain trees for a good 20 minutes (in hard hats). After the long lecture about what his company did, we got back in the bus and took a 30 minute drive deep into the forest to try to find spotted owls.

This is where my boring and tedious lab took a turn for the better. We found the spot in the forest where the spotted owls had made a home for themselves, and the man leading us began to lecture us again. At first i braced myself for another long and pointless lecture, however the man told the class that he brought two mice with him so we could feed the owls. He asked if anyone in our class would like to feed the owls, and two of my classmates raised their hands. He gave one of them a large stick and placed the mouse on the stick. Once the mouse started crawling, an owl from a nearby branch swooped down inches above all our heads and grabbed the mouse off of the stick in the blink of an eye. My whole class was standing in the middle of the forest awestruck (in hard hats) because of what we had all witnessed. It instantly changed my view of the lab. Literally in the second that the owl grabbed the mouse, the lab went from boring and tedious to exciting and amazing. I never thought i would ever see an owl take a mouse and eat it right in front of my face.

After we watched the owls a little longer, we hiked back to the bus and began the long ride back to campus.