Is it visiting time??

Have you ever spent time as a hospital patient? I spent a week in Alaska Regional back in 2000 and it was the most boring time I ever spent any place. The TV was worse than when I was a kid. The food wasn't bad, it just wasn't good. I had visitors, but the day still dragged on. I begged the doctor to send me home.

This past Friday we had a volunteer recruiting deal at the Alaska Zoo. The people who work the zoo are top notch. I brought some displays from the Bird TLC Clinic and I took them back on Sunday.

As I left Bird TLC after dropping off the displays, I heard all kinds of magpie noises coming from the mew yard. We have just three magpies in the magpie rehab mew, but it was way too much noise to be coming just from them. As I looked around the corner of the building, I saw six magpies making all kinds of a ruckus with our three magpies in their rehab mew. I could see in their mew was the magpie ceasar salad that days crew had feed them and they weren't sharing. The salad had hard boiled egg, salmon, veggies and all the stuff a magpie loves. Those on the outside were voicing their disapproval, but the ones on the inside were telling them "tough cookies". Then they spotted me and four of them took off for the safety of the roof tops of the other mews. Two stood their ground, hoping to get some of the salad, but nope, the patients weren't giving any of it up.

Our three magpies in rehab didn't have any books to read or TV to watch, but there was plenty of entertainment going on around them. We also don't wake them at 4AM to take a sleeping pill. Good thing Bird TLC is located in a industrial warehouse area or we would have some very angry neighbors from all the magpie noise.