Day 3: Aviary Enclosures

Hancock's Group Report:

On March 5, 2014, after attendance was taken, groups (Hancock and Gianessi) went up to the Hesbell deck and we talked more about what kind of birds we wanted to have and asked questions like "Can we buy a new and different shape sized cage?" and "Can we color the cage and put nice stuff inside?" Some of us tried to get on the WiFi to look at Birds of Prey and the WiFi ended up not working and it seemed like Ms. Hancock was getting frustrated. It ended up working! (yay)
Our group asked all the questions, so you know our project is gonna be pretty awesome. We're gonna have a cool bird and a cool cage! Ms. Hancock's group is obviously the best. Some of us drew out lots of different shaped cages and they all looked good.

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Gianessi's Group Report: 

We began the meeting with a employee from the park giving a presentation on what he would like to see the design of the bird cages. He showed us the dimensions of the cage and an picture of the basic layout they have for the Aviary. Mrs. Geneisi then gave us all our own binders were we wrote our names on them and she would keep track of who's was who's.
We discussed potential animals and cage designs. One of the animals being the Snow Owl, this bird lives in Northern Illinois and is the heaviest in the owl family. One design that someone brought up that we should build the cages underground and have a "birds eye view." Questions were asked on how he wanted the cages to look specifically and what the groups were allowed to do to manipulate how the cages look. The groups were told that their had to be a spot in the enclosure that would allow the bird to feel safe and not freak out. The groups were also told that the bird needs a spot to sleep in and be comfortable in the winter. We sort of got into a bit of a tough spot when we did not know what we wanted to do for the rest of the project so we started to get a bit off topic. Our group photographer started to take pictures of all the group members which will be shown in later blogs.

We did not really decide on what we wanted to see in our cages or what bird we were one-hundred percent on. We started to discuss roles on who would work on what parts of the project, such as signs, cage design. Then our group talked about how they wanted to go about future meetings. Finally at the end of our meeting we were informed by our group leader Jake Hines that he already had a modification to the bird layout, and he would bring it to the next meeting.

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Koss' Group Report:

Today, we strictly focused on designed the aviary. Aj came up with a lot of cool ideas and they are: perches inside the cages, flowers around the whole aviary, fresh water pond, pathway concrete, flowers are native, flowers on berm, tall grass on back, circle/square/triangle cages, stepping stone ideas, and make the stepping stone different colors. We think that putting sunflowers along the woods boarder would look pretty cool. We also thought about putting an open area up top, and putting the birds on leashes so the birds can get fresh air. Along with the pond, we would like to get fish, and have the kids be able to feed them.

Mike brought to our attention that you can not see through the fences very well, or take pictures of the birds so we had had to come up with an idea so you can see it better. We came up with putting plexi glass in the cages. Either one all the way down the middle so short or tall people can see it, or put two different windows, one high and one low.

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Chumbley's Group Report: 

 All the groups gathered in the Hespel deck to see where they're going for today and what they are doing.

Mrs. pointer and Mr. Chumbley's group got together to talk about the layout of the cages and how we could design them.

We then split up to talk about the design and layout of the cages. In Chumbley's group we got into smaller groups of 2-3 and got our own jobs like painting and landscaping.

All in all it was a great day and we further added on to our project.