I'm Kalina, a '27 from Sofia, Bulgaria. I love books (I love reading and writing them), and I particularly love fantasy (i.e. I'm an expert on Middle Earth and Hogwarts studies). I love all branches of science, from particle physics to neuroscience, and I'm also steadily falling in love with journalism and telling real stories about real people, for once. I also love hiking, bird-watching, climbing, and em dashes.
Spring at Dartmouth might be my favorite season. The green color is finally returning to the trees and the Green (which used to look like "the White" and then "the [muddy] Brown"). It's light outside as early as six thirty in the morning and as late as eight in the evening. And most importantly, (glance up at the title), yup.
The birds are coming back from their winter migration, and the DOC (the Dartmouth Outing Club) is leading more trips than any time before. There are canoeing and kayaking trips, there are hiking trips, and there are birding trips!
Last week, Flora and Fauna (FnF) trip leader Ada took us to the Vermont Institute of Natural Science (VINS) to attend an owl festival. We were a group of six or seven students, some of us really excited about birds, others merely looking for something fun to do over the weekend, and we saw some really cool owls. We traveled for twenty minutes and then we attended a few interactive lectures about a falcon and a few owls.
A barred owl we saw at VINS
This week, FnF leader Wyatt took us up the Connecticut River to look at some migratory birds. We saw bald eagles, red-winged blackbirds, a kingfisher, an osprey. All we had to do to see such a plethora of species was to drive along the river and the nearby brooks and look around with our binoculars. The DOC has its collection of bird guides and binoculars everybody has access to!
A red-winged blackbird
And next week, FnF chair Duda is taking a group of students, me included, to a DOC-owned cabin in the woods to search for owls. That's gonna be owl-citing!
