Jason Martir

SeaWorld San Diego

 

Jason was selected by his SeaWorld supervisor to attend the Sylvan Heights Avian Husbandry & Management Program along with fellow SeaWorld aviculturist Richard Sardena. Below are some of Jason’s comments regarding the Avian Program.

 

I really enjoyed the challenge of trying to identify all of the of the birds species in the Sylvan Heights collection. They have so many more birds than our collection, but there’s a much smaller staff. Yet everything gets done and the birds are healthy. The scope of the job at Sylvan Heights is so much larger than what we do in our breeding program.

 

Mike would give us a project to accomplish. He would check in during the day to see how it’s going and give us insight on how to do it better or identify what’s really important. It was amazing how I just kept working along with the staff and suddenly I realized how much I had learned. I’ve definitely learned how to use food and other resources more effectively, plus many other things like incubation techniques, providing birds with more naturalistic nesting sites and how to take human error out of the equation.