October 6th, 2010

Today was the last day of symposia! I had wanted to go to the symposium The Role of Wildlife in Global Emerging Diseases for the morning, but we all stayed up too late celebrating the Quiz Bowl team’s win and slept in today. Some of us took advantage of the extremely heated swimming pool (it was like swimming in bath water) and hot tub. I did make it to some afernoon talks, though. I hopped between Conservation and Management of Mammals and Human Dimensions, Conservation Education, and Conservation Policy. The last talk I went to was entitled “Suburban hunter education” and I wanted to hear it just to know what that was actually about. The speaker was for hunting in suburban areas. I don’t know how I feel about that. I understand that white-tailed deer are a problem in the eastern states due to overpopulation, but the image of hunters shooting around in the suburbs seemed like a bit much to me. The rest of the day we all cleaned. A lot. When you have about 20 kids in 2 suites (plus our adopted members from Wyoming who ended up staying with us instead of the shady house their president had them staying in), you’re left with quite a fine mess. We also packed so we could check out on time the next morning to head to the next hotel. After all that, there was nothing left to do but relax (and do any homework and reading that we brought with us).