Liberating Wings

Nourishing and Healing Our Spirits and the World

Me teaching about how to nourish wild macaw chicks 

In my last blog I spoke of how the conservation team in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve is attempting to augment the wild macaw population by incubating eggs and placing the hatched chick into foster nests. This process entails being able to feed the chick once s/he hatches up until it is accepted by his or her new parents.  Feeding parrot chicks may be routine in captive, controlled situations, but how do you prepare and serve food in areas with spotty electricity, long hours away from any kind of store?

To answer this question, I gave a presentation on feeding wild chicks yesterday at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s headquarters in Flores, El Peten, Guatemala.  I reviewed concepts and techniques of pediatric nutrition, and demonstrated how to use Nutristart.  Nutristart is a powder that you simply mix with hot water to have a complete diet for parrot chicks, although adding 1/8^th to 1 tsp of peanut butter might be needed for macaws. Lafeber Company donated this food so that WCS may feed the chicks, which will nourish the wild macaw population.  Following this I demonstrated how to use Emeraid, also from Lafeber Company. This is a powdered enteral diet for weak or debilitated chicks. They do see sick and malnourished chicks in the wild, especially the 3^rd chick, and an easily prepared emergency diet such as this might save future lives.

 

Chepe volunteering to be a chick so I could demonstrate tube feeding 

As a wrap up for out time together, I asked a few questions to augment my ethnoornithology study, which is focusing on how to support the human dimension of avian conservation in Central America.  

Filming the presentation and ethnoornithological discussion 

I asked the conservation team members what values were important to them that they got to live out in their work.  They spoke of the importance of their relationships with one another: that they are united, and value the dedication, respect, humor, and creative interplay that fills their days and nourishes their own spirits. Under it all is their love for conservation and to be doing something positive, with others, that helps heal the world.  I then asked what they would ask of the world and they replied to you. “Do something real, not just for show. Every person can do something, and what you do, no matter where you are, will help us here.”

 I translate this into:  If the situation of the world or your community bugs you, do something about it.  It matters what you do!

 

Bug seen from side of road on our way back to Flores (photo by Dr. Melvin Merida) 

 

Compassionate Conservation in Central America

 

 (Yellow-naped Parrot)

Studies confirm that caregivers play host to a high level of compassion fatigue. Day in, day out, workers struggle to function in care giving environments that constantly present heart wrenching, emotional challenges. Affecting positive change in society, a mission so vital to those passionate about caring for others, is perceived as elusive, if not impossible. This painful reality, coupled with first-hand knowledge of society's flagrant disregard for the safety and well being of the feeble and frail, takes its toll on everyone from full time employees to part time volunteers. Eventually, negative attitudes prevail.

Compassion Fatigue symptoms are normal displays of chronic stress resulting from the care giving work we choose to do. Leading traumatologist Eric Gentry suggests that people who are attracted to care giving often enter the field already compassion fatigued. A strong identification with helpless, suffering, or traumatized people or animals is possibly the motive. It is common for such people to hail from a tradition of what Gentry labels: other-directed care giving. Simply put, these are people who were taught at an early age to care for the needs of others before caring for their own needs. Authentic, ongoing self-care practices are absent from their lives. (more on Compassion Fatigue)

 

Easily recognizable in others and perhaps ourselves, Compassion Fatigue surfaces repeatedly in conservation.   By experiencing compassion, that is, deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it, conservation team members may find themselves unable to contribute and communicate as efficiently and with as much satisfaction as they would like. By combining compassion and communication as an intentional practice tool in conservation medicine, and drawing heavy on social and emotional intelligence, our medical kit becomes like Mary Poppin's magical bag, a seemingly endless reservoir of methods to attend to the multiple beings in our circles of care, including ourselves.

 

I will be leaving soon for Honduras and Guatemala on a Compassionate Conservation trip.  My back bedroom is strewn with gear of all kinds to comprise my field kit for studying and supporting conservation projects in Central America.  The projects in which I will be partaking are:

 

Lecturing at University in Tegucigalpa

Lecturing and consulting at Tegucigalpa Metropolitan Zoo

Consulting, pilot study and  survey of wild psittacine chicks in La Moskitia, Honduras

Consulting wild psittacine conservation, El Petén Guatemala

Lecturing at University of San Carlos, Guatemala

Ethno-ornithological/Integral Ecology Study

Writer/reporter/witness regarding the lives of people and parrots in Central America

 

I go as an independent consultant, Director of Lafeber Conservation (thank you very much for the grants Lafeber Company!), and as myself.  Having experienced the burn out and overwhelming challenges of front line conservation in Guatemala, I know how important it is to have support.  I have worked hard over the last decade acquiring the social and emotional intelligence skills necessary for conservation, lightening my load by letting go of some unnecessary baggage. So though my current toolkit is packed full of medicines, cameras, and outdoor equipment, probably the most important tools I can bring are those that deal with the human dimensions of conservation and wildlife management.  These I carry in my heart and mind (thank goodness as the airlines won't charge me for extra baggage!).

 

I will do my best to text/twitter from the field, so come here for updates (either as an update or as a twitter entry on the sidebar).

 

In compassionate hope,

 

LoraKim

Healing Arts and Hearts of Science

Sermon Delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville

August 23, 2009

Rev. LoraKim Joyner, D.V.M.

 

 

 

Download Healing Hearts and Arts of Science August 2009

 

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