Incredibly true adventures of a field biologist

Next steps

2011-10-13T12:03:00.001-06:00

So far in my academic career, the path forward has a well-marked trail. That doesn't mean the hike is easy. Sometimes is often quite steep or rocky, and people are falling off the side of the mountain all the time. But, the way forward is usually pretty clearly marked.

But now, the end is getting close and the way forward is murky. This is partially driven by the fact that all students are striving to get their degree, but once the degree is in hand our goals suddenly diverge in many directions. Freshly minted PhDs in my field get jobs in industry, government, non-profit conservation agencies, private consulting groups or even writing for the popular press. Each of these paths require their own path forward. However, most of us are gunning for a academic tenure-track faculty position. But that single destination can be approached from many directions. Some biologist go straight to the job, they don't pass go or collect $200. However, most would-be faculty members spend some time as a post-doc, which is like a medical doctor residency. Your a real doctor, but your still in training and still answer to an adviser, though hopefully you have a little more latitude than you did as a grad student.
But all post-docs are not equal and the ways that you get a post-doc are varied and diverse. There are research post-docs, there are teaching post-docs and there are combination post-docs. There are the big, glamorous, national agency fellowships (National Science Foundation or National Institute of Health), there are university fellowships, there are private organization fellowships, and there are research institutions fellowships. Some provide funding for 5 years, others for 6 months. Another option is to write a grant with a adviser of your choice and hope it is funded. Or, if they already have funding, you can apply for the position like you would a more typical job. Some advisers will treat you as a colleague and collaborator, allowing you to be involved in the design and planning of the research. Others will use you as a glorified lab technician and manager.

The best part is that every one of these options have different application procedures, and all of them take substantial chucks of time. The due dates for applications are also all over the calendar and some applications will be evaluated in a single month, while other programs can take more than 6 months (cough-NSF-cough). Consequently, if you are lucky or brilliant and get multiple offers, you'll probably get them at all different times. This means you'll likely have to make decisions based on very incomplete data. I know people who have turned down positions hoping for something better, but never got another offer. And others who accepted a less than ideal position because it was a sure thing, only to find out too late that they also won a dream fellowships position that they had to turn down.

You would be foolish to put all your eggs in one basket. But each basket takes time to weave. And time spent weaving baskets is time taken away from writing the dissertation. Ahhh... trade-offs, my constant companion, where have you been? It's been at least 10 minutes since I saw you last. I think my next entry should be devoted to you and you alone.

Juggling, aka multitasking

2011-06-21T08:03:00.000-06:00

There was a dark time in my life, after undergrad and before I got a job as a wildlife biologist (which was before grad school) when I took any job I could get in order to eat. Being the bright youngster that I was I figured if I needed to eat, might as well get a job in a restaurant. So I bluffed my way into a job as a cook at a 24 hour diner. There were many, many, things about this job that sucked. But, I got really good at juggling a lot of things at once. Not real juggling mine you, but multitasking. I worked the drunk shift (weekend nights 10pm- 6am) and it was a very popular diner so from the moment I got there until around 4:30am we were slammed. As the cook I had to make ALL of the food for the place and that meant simultaneously preparing hamburgers, eggs Benedict, enchiladas, pasta, fajitas, pancakes, etc. These things all take different skills and different amount of time to prepare. To do the job right I had to keep a lot of different things in my head and switch back and forth rapidly.
What the heck does this have to do with being a biologist you ask? Well, the pace of the work is, usually, a little slower. But, I am still constantly switching between assignments, and these switches normally involve not only switching subjects, but also switching skill sets. I'm endlessly switching from data entry, to statistics, to writing a paper on a study I finished 4 years ago to brainstorming about what study I want to do in 2 years (or 10), to preparing a presentation, to writing a blog entry about the adventure along the way. I am naturally a multitasker, which helps. But, I can't help but think my time as a diner cook helped.

Batting average

2011-04-23T10:17:00.002-06:00

So, turns out science is hard. I know this, no one goes into research thinking it will be easy. We all know the stories of the great discoveries that were accidents or that took 3 gazillion attempts before things worked. But somehow it can still come as a shock whenever you start a new project, especially on that revolves around free-living birds that do things. Unfortunate things like not even showing up for the behavioral trial.
Part of the problem is that once something has been figured out, it's not exciting or novel anymore, so you can only get so much mileage out of it. We all know that replicating findings is important. But, if that is all you do... you are going nowhere fast.
So you try something new, something exciting, something that, if it works, would get you a paper in a nice, highly-ranked journal, or act as preliminary findings for a new grant. But whenever you try something new, you're taking a chance, rolling the dice, and hoping it doesn't come up craps.
A friend of mine compares research to baseball, if you are batting .300 you are doing pretty darn good. But if you think about it that means you are failing more times than not, more than twice as many times actually. So once again, success in science is as much about the willingness to persevere in the face of failure as it is about being able to succeed. Kind of like a lot of other things.

Rejection

2011-03-21T07:41:00.002-06:00

One of the hardest things about being an academic is that we are constantly prostrating ourselves to our peers and asking for their approval. Not because we want a pat on the back or to feel good about ourselves but because our existence depends on it. Grants, papers, talks, they all are geared towards presenting our work so that others will give us the thumbs up and say that it is good. To be successful you have to get your colleagues to agree that your work is exciting and important.
To some extent this is no different than being in high school or college. You work on projects or write papers and submit them to the higher authority and hope they like your work. But, now instead of being given an assignment to work on for a week (or even 6 weeks), you come up with your own assignment. You develop an idea yourself (something you think is fascinating and important), you come up with the questions (and hope they are interesting to others), you design the research (and try to make it rigorous, powerful, and feasible), you analyze the data (and make every effort to use the right stats), you write the paper (and hope your ideas translate well). You spend months or sometimes years on one single paper, then you give it (your baby) to a journal editor and they send it out to some anonymous experts to review. And then you wait.
And you wait, and you wait to hear back. And then, finally, you get the verdict. More often than not, the answer is no. No, we don't think this is exciting enough, or novel enough or important enough. No, we don't think you did this, that and the other correctly. No, although you agonized over your word choice and whether to analyze the data this way or that way, the conclusion you came to is wrong. And there it is.
That baby, the one you labored on for so long, they don't like it and don't want it. It is not good enough for them. And for some people this easily translates into, you are not good enough. It can be challenging for the ego to say the least. And you do this over and over and over again. This is your entire career. Repeatedly handing an axe over to someone else, laying you head down on the chopping block and hoping you did enough hard work, and are lucky enough, that the axe won't fall.

Lessons

2010-12-10T07:02:00.004-07:00

Ugh. I learned a hard one yesterday. I was so close to being done with a manuscript I've been working on for a long time. As I was finishing up some minor edits and ran some stats to get some additional numbers. While doing so I noticed a few weird data points. I start looking more closely at the weird ones. Huh, that is strange. I go back to the original electronic data sheet to make sure there wasn't an error importing into the statistics program, but no, everything jives. I pull out the original data sheets and feel a surge of adrenalin run through my body. Wrong. The electronic data I have is wrong. This particular part of the project was done by an undergrad, and another undergrad finalized it for me. I never went back and triple checked the data. Dumb. Real, real dumb, to assume two separate set of eyes would take care of the errors. Not everything is wrong, but enough. Enough that I am now correcting the data and will have to redo the stats from scratch for this part of the paper. And if the results are different....
Oh, I can't think about that right now.
If I do I'll go crazy.
I'll think about that tomorrow.
-Scarlett

p's and q's

2010-11-06T18:36:00.003-06:00

Ugh. It's Saturday night and I'm sitting here with my laptop formatting a paper for submission to a journal. Does that make me old, lame or is it just the mark of a fifth year grad student feeling the heat? Probably all of the above.
As a youngster I never appreciated the amount of work that goes into formatting a paper for submission. As a student you only see the finished product and it's easy to be blissfully unaware of what it takes to get it there. It takes days, full eight hour days, to get a paper that is complete and ready in all other respects ready to be submitted. There are a ton of little things that must be done. Like making sure all of your p's (a commonly used statistics symbol) are all in italics and capitalized. But guess what, every journal does it differently, so in one journal it may look like this P, but in the next one it's this p, and others are simply p. This is just one example of many.
So you write the paper, you edit, you rewrite, you get feedback and rewrite and reedit. Then you polish it till it shines, and then, only then, do you get to format, and how you do that depends on where you want it to go. And when it gets rejected and you decide to send it somewhere else? Even if you change nothing about the writing you'll still spend a couple of days reformatting. And that doesn't even include the dreaded bibliography, or figures. Those two sections can suck your soul out of your eyeballs.

Perks

2010-09-22T13:20:00.005-06:00

See those pictures? I get to go there. For free. There are a number of perks to being an academic, that is one of my favorites. Traveling to new and exciting places and part of your duties. I'm headed to Western Australia this week to attend a conference (International Society for Behavioral Ecology) and present some of my work. It will be a very nerdy week. All day, everyday, listening to interesting people talk about their fascinating work, telling them about mine, arguing about conclusions and methods, making connections with potential future collaborators and advisers. And then, when my brain is filled to point of bursting and feels more like gray mush than gray matter, I get to take off and travel to countryside for a week before coming back to the real world. It will be spring there, the wild flowers blooming, the whales migrating, and the weather idyllic. It's hard to be me.

2010-08-16T15:26:00.004-06:00

Field season is over. I've made it back home and have begun the work of reclaiming the life I left behind. For four months I've been away from my partner, my dog, my house and my garden and all of which require a significant amount of attention before they are prepared to forgive me for my over long absence. It is not an easy thing to leave your life for a third of the year.

If things go as planned this will have been my last field season. What this really means is that, in theory, I have collected all of the data I need for my dissertation. This is exhilarating as I am in range of getting a doctoral degree and moving along to the next step. It is also terrifying in that there is nothing between me and the finish line except data analysis and writing. There is a reason that there are a number of people with the title ABD (all but dissertation). It sounds like a small task but in truth it is the hardest part.

I didn't have a picture to illustrate so instead I've included an image from one of my favorite procrastination places. hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com
Go there and enjoy, but don't blame me...

Science as art

2010-06-11T08:23:00.005-06:00

Many people assume that to be a successful scientist you need only to be good at science, and maybe the occasional related field, like math. But the reality is far different. To be successful at science, especially the sort of integrative science that I work on, you have to be able to communicate. So much of our work revolves around being able to convey to others what it is we do and why it is important. Others meaning journal editors (who control when and where we publish which is the currency by which we succeed or fail) and grant readers (who control whether or not we get money to do the research that we want to publish on). But it also means other scientists, the public and students. The ability to write clearly is a hard won skill and not one that we learn very well in high school or even college. Same with presenting our ideas and findings orally. There is an art to being an effective communicator, and there is a minimal level of competence needed to do this job. Of course, many scientist are just barely above this minimum and can only communicate with each other (sometimes that is even a stretch). I think this is a big reason why the general public is skeptical or uninformed about science, i.e. the evolution debate. We, as a group, are just not that good and talking to others, we are as a rule a socially awkward bunch.
I'm currently working as a mentor for a group of undergraduates and that is among the hardest lessons to learn. They understand the concepts, they can do the work. The hard part is putting into words. The above photo shows one of these undergrads and a fellow mentor doing the fun and easy part of science, collecting data.

2010-03-06T11:46:00.003-07:00

Is it just me or is that flower sticking it's tongue out at me? This time of year it seems like most things are taunting me. I have a little more than a month left before I leave for the field and sometimes I feel like a hunk of taffy, being pulled in opposite directions constantly. Because the field season is looming I want to spend all of my time preparing for the season. However, I can't really prepare if I don't know what the results were from last summer yet. In order to be successful I really need to get some papers published soon, but if I'm spending my time writing I'm not analyzing last year's data. I also need to need to continue presenting the findings I do have, and applying for grants that allow me to continue to fund my research, but can't do those things at the same time I'm analyzing old data or preparing to collect new stuff.
Consequently, being a grad student is similar to being a short-order cook (I can say this with authority since I worked for a couple of years as a cook). You have to multitask constantly, and if you forget about something, it burns, gets cold, is incorrect, or doesn't get made in the first place. So to be successful, you have to keep a lot of balls in the air. As panicky as I am about how soon the field season will begin, in some ways it will be a relief because once it starts all I do is collect data, there is no real time for much else.

Let's do the time warp

2010-01-27T12:20:00.003-07:00

Again, and again. Somehow it is already the end of January. I'm not at all sure how that happened. It always astounds me how fast time goes, and I often have much less to show for it than I would like. In three short months I'll be heading back to the field, probably for the last time during my dissertation years. Before that happens I need to develop a good plan of attack, and that requires knowing what exactly I found out last year. However, given that my data collection patterns are shotgun rather than laser in nature, this takes a bit of work. And the clock is ticking. Time to ratchet down and crunch through a large number of hormone assays, behavioral data, statistics and manuscript preparations. This is not the fun part of the field biologist job, but it can be very exciting when you get the data in hand. The drum rolls, you hold your breathe and do the stats. And then you cry, or more commonly in my case, think to yourself "that is amazing, i must have done the stats wrong, lets try it again". But either way time waits for no biologist, no matter how much we'd like it to.

Hasta

2009-08-04T14:18:00.005-06:00

The season starts and you head to the field. You hire a few field assistants to help with the work. You also act as a mentor for a few undergraduates, bright-eyed youngsters interested in becoming field biologist themselves. They all arrive as strangers that you've emailed with briefly or talked to once or twice. Then you eat, sleep, work and play with this small group of people for months, while having very limited contact with the outside world. They share your failures, celebrate your successes and laugh at you and with you through the season. Then, all of a sudden, the season is over and you're saying goodbye to everyone as we all go our separate ways.
I may see a few of them down the road if they stay in the field, it's a very small world. Some you'll get the occasional email from. But most of them, you'll never hear from again. They'll immerse themselves back into their lives while you do the same in your own. At the end you're left with the memories, and you'll tell their stories to the next group the next year, and so it goes. On and on, year after year.

boiling it all down

2009-07-21T13:58:00.003-06:00

The end of the season is approaching, fast. For grad students like mean it's time to wrap things up, make sure every i is dotted and t is crossed. You start thinking of the upcoming fall and the tests, assays and such that awaits you before you can really get down to the nitty-gritty and figure out what you learned over the season. However, many grad students spend the season not only doing their own research but also mentoring an undergraduate that has hopes of grad school. Think of it as practice for being a full fledged professor running your own lab. You help them come up with project ideas, design the research, execute it, and finally analyze and present it. I'm currently acting in such a role as part of the National Science Foundation's Research Experience for Undergraduates Program (REU). This is a 10 week program designed to give interested undergrads a taste of what research is really like, the trials, tribulations, exaltations and humiliations. This summer I have been mentoring 2 such students but the program is coming to an end. Consequently, I am helping them compile and analyze their data. So rather than spending all day everyday outside chasing birds, as I usually do, I am locked in the office playing with spreadsheets and statistic programs. Yeah for me. But, fortunately, it looks like we're getting some very cool results. So all the work will pay with interest.

snack time

2009-06-21T18:40:00.003-06:00

Looks cute doesn't it. A tiny adorable little ball of fur, cutely stuffing its face.
Now, imagine that it is not peanuts but babies stuffed into its fat little cheeks, bird babies. These maniacal little fiends are devastating the junco (my songbird study species) population this year. Roughly 80% of the nests we manage to locate are eaten before they are old enough to leave the nest. This is usually, but not always, due to chipmunks. Not only is this tough on the juncos, trying over and over again to get a batch of young to independence before they are munched like beer nuts, but it is also tough on the poor, hard-working junco researchers that slave for hours and hours in the field to find these nests for our research. This is just the way it goes though if you study a tasty animal. Juncos are great because they are common and plentiful, but for that same reason there are plenty of other animals out there doing their part to keep the population from exploding out of control. These things go in multiyear cycles. About every five years or so there is a good crop of acorns, which allows a lot of rodents to make it through the winter. The following summer there are rodents everywhere, eating everything. This is one of those years. Lucky me, I get to be here to see it.

Sitting quietly

2009-06-01T18:59:00.003-06:00

Amazing things happen when you sit quietly in the woods. All sorts of shy creatures, the type that one rarely sees, emerge and go about their daily business. Generally speaking people, including myself, are too busy getting where they are going to stop and sit long enough to see the forest come alive. We're busy getting to the overlook, the waterfall, the campsite or car. But if you pause and settle yourself somewhere unobtrusive the bashful being that make up the majority of living things around us will gradually poke their heads out. Most of the time I'm trying to get 8 things done at once and have little time to engage in such behavior. But, lately, because of the nature of some of my work, I've had the chance to stop and sit awhile. And it's been lovely. Seeing things most people never see, except on television, goes along way to improving ones outlook on life. I highly recommend it.

weather

2009-05-06T14:39:00.005-06:00

One of the things I love about field work is that it makes you very, very, very aware of the world outside your walls. Any given day is filled with a handful of decisions that all swing on what the weather is doing now, what it just finished doing a while ago, and what it will be doing in the near future. Case in point. One of the methods we use to catch birds involves a devise called a mist-net. These are very fine nets that, if properly placed, are difficult to see for both a person and a bird. Depending on what kind of bird you are trying to catch there are numerous sizes to choose from, as well as ways to place them in order to maximize your chances of getting birds. When a bird is caught in the net it hangs in a little pouch like a hammock until we get there to pull it out (we check very frequently and are well trained at this task). Sometimes the birds seem a little dazed and will sit in your hand a for a minute or two before it flies away. The picture is a female Ruby-throated hummingbird doing just that. These nets are very effective and can catch large numbers of birds quickly, if, and that's a big if, they are run when the weather is right. Sun is bad, it makes the nets more visible, and wind is worse because not only is something moving in the breeze easy to see but the wind can also blow the net into the nearby foliage, not good for the net or the netters. However, here in the mountains of Virginia, our biggest issue is moisture. Damp is fine, cloudy is excellent, we can even handle fog. But if it is truly misting then the nets get covered in moisture and become very visible. It is very often very wet up here. So we are constantly deciding whether it is worth the considerable effort to open nets. We compulsively scan the sky and, when the internet connection is working, check the radar to see what's coming our way. All in an effort to maximize the amount of time we have the nets open, without having the heavy clouds dump on us while we're running them. We are all amateur meteorologists. We spend a lot of time looking at the haze around the moon, evaluating the wind and always keep an eye to the sky.

And so it begins....

2009-04-18T17:17:00.002-06:00

The season has begun, and with a vengeance. We devote the first month of the season to trying to capture and band every junco on the study site. Sounds simple, but it amounts to a month of 14+ hour days. However, it's worth it. Nothing sucks more than than finding a nest with an unbanded female and having it fail before you can band her. Sucks. Trust me on that one. Anyway, we started on tax day and in the last 3 days we've caught about 70 birds. That's a lot, especially for the first few days. I am exhausted.

REU preparations

2009-04-03T06:47:00.003-06:00

I'm currently in high gear preparing for exodus to the field. This involves finalizing plans for what exactly I'll be trying to accomplish this summer, coordinating with all of the other researchers I work with so we don't step on each others toes (figuratively and literally), ordering supplies, and developing projects for the undergraduates that will be working with us this summer. This last one is an interesting challenge. I'm a mentor for an NSF program called Research Experience for Undergraduates (commonly called REU). Undergraduates from all over the country apply to be a part of this program and get matched up with researchers that are equally scattered all over the country. As a mentor I get to walk a line that balances letting these students develop and execute their own projects, but also supervise enough so that the project is feasible, with appropriate methods etc., and successful. Our lab has a strong record of these projects leading to publications, which is great for everyone. The mentor gets additional data collected that they wouldn't have time to work on otherwise. The student gets experience developing an actual research project from the ground up, and if things go well they wind up with a publication/presentation that helps to make them more competitive when it comes time to apply to grad school themselves. Sounds great right? Well it is, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

Third year slam

2009-01-23T14:50:00.003-07:00

So, I'm in my third year now and I have no classes, no teaching, and no major grant deadlines rapidly approaching. Given all of that, why oh why am I not getting more done. The most surprising thing about the life of a grad student is how little time we actually get to devote to our research. An astounding amount of time is consumed by meetings for various committees or groups we're involved in, writing permit amendments, putting together talks about our research, ordering supplies for our research, reading papers by others that is associated with our research etc etc etc.
That may be why the field is so alluring. For months on end I do nothing but research. Who knows when I'll actually get to analyze it, but at least I'd be collecting it.
But for the next few months I am focused on the flurry of activity that precludes field work. Namely, determining what I learned last year.

Conference recovery

2009-01-09T12:16:00.002-07:00

I've just returned from a major national conference and am in the process of recovering, converting the matter between my ears from mush back into grey stuff. All in all it was good, though exhausting. It's a little nerve wracking to get up in front of a bunch of people who have forgotten more than you currently know about the subject you are presenting on. However, I got some excellent feedback and met, or re-met, the major players in my field. Hopefully that will help down the road when I start applying for post-doc positions. Who knew that biological research was so like politics, but then, it is a human endeavor so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

Another one bites the dust

2008-11-19T06:21:00.006-07:00

I am baffled by people that find the time to post every day, or heck, every week. I struggle to get something up ever month. Not because I have nothing to say, but because I am drowning in work.
Enough complaining. The title of the post refers to milestones. Last week another one of mine kicked the bucket. I wrote, presented and defended my dissertation proposal. All told, without figures or literature cited, it was over 30 pages single spaced. Ridiculous you say? Well maybe, but my work is very integrative and combines evolutionary theory on the evolution of sex differences with behavior and endocrinology (study of hormones). So, I had a lot to tie together.
But...That being said, I am pretty dern happy about the project and now have a road map for the next few years of what to do. So now i just need to get to work and get some papers out. But first I have to catch up on everything that's been put off. Sigh.

Proposal writing

2008-10-10T06:56:00.006-06:00

So, somehow or another I'm now in my third year of grad school, my how time flies. That means it's time to write up my dissertation proposal, which is basically my plan for the rest of grad school. Like many, I have a bunch of projects started, many of them related, but i have to pick an overarching theme that unites my interest, drop the stuff that doesn't fit and ratchet down my focus. Being more than a little ADHD this is a tad challenging. Add this to the fact that this is somehow my busiest semester ever and you can probably get a mental image of a grad student running around like a chicken with its head cut off, as my mother would say.

The comic is from PhD comics, very funny, sometimes a little too close to truth

It's that time again

2008-09-17T18:53:00.003-06:00

For a number of reasons, fall is always a time of frantic activity for me. In addition to the usual school and home obligations additional factors add to fuel to the fire. I've recently returned from the field with mounds of unanalyzed data. I have a partner, pet and home that I've been away from for months. The weather is perfect to work on the house/yard. And... it's proposal season.
Many of the major grants & fellowships me and my kind can apply for to fund our research have deadlines during the fall months. As a result, the already hectic schedule is thrown into overdrive as we try to shove another pot on the already crowded stove.
It's about trade-offs, as are many things. You need the data to tweak and support your proposal but if your running the assays and such to get the data you can't work on the proposal. So one must decide whether to do both things shoddily, or one thing well.
And as my sister always reminds me, remember to breathe....

Roving teenage gangs

2008-07-17T09:03:00.003-06:00

Sounds menacing huh? Except I'm talking about juncos rather than humans. After fledges become independent (the parents stop putting up with their begging) they bunch up with other juvenile juncos and rove around together in packs. We take advantage of this by setting up mist nets all over the study site to catch anyone we haven't already caught and get them banded. Mist nets are super fine nets that (if you set them up right) are very difficult to see and the birds will fly right into the net and slide down into a pocket and hang their like their in a hammock until we get there and extract them. Here's picture to illustrate. Our field assistant Amy is freeing one. You have to look close to see the net b/c it's so fine. We'll be doing this the rest of the season. Sometimes we catch a whole flock of 15-20 birds at once. Needless to say it's a busy time of year.

Fledging day

2008-06-02T18:35:00.004-06:00

So today was fledging day. For those who don't know that's the day the nestling leave the nest. For our project we try to get there before they leave the nest to get a few last measurements. It's also a great time to catch mom and dad and get some measures on them. It's among the more exciting things we do, but to balance out the fun it happens right as the sun comes up. So, if the nest is a mile and a half hike down a rock and stream strewn trail, we get to get up extra early and use our headlamps to hike out there. This morning was textbook. The nestlings were still there, and we had set up mist nets (very thin, fine nets used to gently catch birds) the evening prior. So we opened the nets and grabbed the young ones. The parents try to dive bomb us, and in the process wind up in the net, hanging on their back like their in a hammock. In less than 5 minutes we have the whole family. Now we take our measurements and then release everyone, then hike back up the hill. We were back at the field station before 6:45am.
Field work is not for the weak.
The picture is a fledgling from last summer's field season in South Dakota, which explains the dry brown grass and pine trees in the background. Virginia is much greener and leafier.

Holy hidden nests Batman

2008-05-23T15:29:00.003-06:00

So we've switched gears here in junco land. Now is the time when we nest search, and then search some more. And then... what are you doing back already? Get back out there and search some more. Here's a picture of the holy grail of junco land, the elusive nest. It's dead center in the picture. If you look close, and have sharp eyes, you can see a couple of little eggs and the grass and deer hair lining.
Once we find it then we monitor it every few days until it's time for the nestlings to leave the nest, or fledge. Tomorrow is fledging day for two nests. That means we get up before first light to be there and catch the whole family. These are the first two of the year and they conveniently (sarcasm here) coincide with the arrival of my partner tonight. Good thing sleep is only for mortals, not field biologists.

In the trenches

2008-05-06T07:37:00.002-06:00

And so it has begun. I arrived Sunday night and got to work early Monday morning. Much of the time has been spent getting organized and repairing facilities that over winter here in the mountains of VA and so are a little worse for the wear. Since I am in VA this year instead of SD, I have the possibility of a much larger sample size. The price I pay from that sample size is having to negotiate and navigate the projects of two other researchers, as well as my advisor's, so that we don't conflict or mess up each other's data. It can get a bit tricky, but luckily we all get along well so I expect things to work out nicely.
It's still early spring/late winter up here so things are just getting started. All the more reason to get everything under control before it blows wide open.
Duty calls.

tic toc

2008-04-22T06:28:00.002-06:00

Two weeks and counting. So much to finish up with before I head to the field. At least I go with a feather in my cap. I recently heard that I was awarded a fellowship for the next three years. Wooohooo. This means I am not required to teach, and thus can really get some stuff done around here.
If all goes well I'll return from the summer with loads of data, and with the extra time i can be uber productive.
The bummer is that it is FINALLY nice here in the great white north (okay, I know Indiana is not that cold, but give me a break I'm from Texas), and when i leave for the field I'll be going up mountain, which means back into the cold damp. sigh. But, at least in will be pretty.

Summer lovin

2008-04-01T06:42:00.002-06:00

Holy crap.
Somehow it's already April. I have a month, one measly month before I go back into the field for the summer. Between now and then I have one test to grade, another to take, a model to build, permits to finalize, data to collect, and a talk to prepare. Not to mention determining exactly what it is I'm tackling this summer. Where does the time go?

Rite of Passage

2008-03-04T11:10:00.002-07:00

It's over and almost anticlimactic.
I've passed my qualifying exams, and still have skin on my teeth so I feel pretty good about it.
For me the hard part is the waiting, once they start asking questions things take on a life of there own and you have some control, but the waiting kills.
So now I get to begin planning for my field season, write my proposal, catch up on all of the things i've let slide over the past 6 weeks.
But first I'm going to just let my brain melt into mush for awhile.
I've earned that haven't I?

Prelim Hell

2008-02-27T13:17:00.002-07:00

So I feel like i only post to complain.
Right now I'm at the tail end of my preliminary/qualifying exams.
6 weeks of obsessing on four topics, night and day, day and night.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Question is... is it a train???

Proposal Hell

2007-11-07T07:43:00.001-07:00

As a researcher your life's blood depends on convincing people and agencies with money to share the wealth, and fund your research. For the last two weeks I have been in a proposal vortex, frantically writing and rewriting drafts. It all ends later today. Wish me luck.

Website fun

2007-09-17T11:11:00.001-06:00

Loose ends

2007-07-24T12:17:00.000-06:00

Now comes the bittersweet ending. We are both more than ready to see our loved ones and sleep in our own beds. But, there are a million tiny things to do before leaving. List after list is made, one by one items are checked off. After months of diligent science, now our focus is on cleaning out the fridge and packing up clothes that are almost walking themselves to the washer. In the midst of it all we did make it to the North Hills to check out the birds up there. Whoa daddy, is it wetter and cooler. We've made some lovely friends with the Black Hills botany crowd and they let us crash their place near Spearfish. Not bad huh?
So now the season draws to a close and we look forward to all of the hormone assays and data analysis that will fill our days for months to come.

wee beasties

2007-07-17T13:46:00.000-06:00

So we're back at it trying to finish strong but events are not conspiring in our favor. It's been well over 100 degrees the past couple of days and even with our best efforts we're hardly catching any birds. It's frustrating to work on 5 hours of sleep in brutal heat and not have much to show for it. Then, to add insult to injury, some form of evil insect hatched recently and seems to love the taste of biologist, especially C. They are tiny little things that swarm all over you and bite, but don't leave marks. Long, thin and reddish or black wee devils. They are roughly the same size as a chigger, but more svelte.Perhaps a biting midge? Lovely no? I know you're jealous. It may be time to give up the ghost soon and head home. All work and no play (data) makes K a cranky biologist.

hittin it hard

2007-07-13T13:03:00.000-06:00

Finally back at work. Feels good to be productive again.
Luckily our field sites are miles and miles away from the burn so our study birds were not affected by the fire. We're on a down hill slide now. How much work can we squeeze in to the next 13 days?

Back in the saddle again

2007-07-11T13:52:00.000-06:00

So we were lucky, very, very lucky. The fire burned down to our driveway, very close to the house and stopped there.
I say stopped, but more truthfully it was halted by the firefighters. We happen to leave right on a spring fed creek and the fighters were using our driveway to refuel the tankers. Convenient for us, no?
So all we have to deal with is spoiled food in the fridge, and not quite reliable electricity. The fire is still far from out though. All night evening and through the night we hear tanker refueling, helicopters flying overhead and fire trucks driving past the house to the section that is still burning. Not the most restful night I've ever had, but I'm not complaining.
Time to get back to work.

Return to Eden

2007-07-10T16:01:00.000-06:00

It seems the rumors are true. In an hour they're opening the road to residents. We got a special get out of jail free card from the sheriff so we could get in as well. What will we find? Who knows. We don't know if we'll have power or water or if the place is even livable (smoke damage is distinctly possible). But at least we'll know where we stand and be able to make a plan for the next few days and weeks.

pins and needles

2007-07-10T10:04:00.000-06:00

Rumors are flying. A cold front blew in last night, the fire is more controlled, we may get in tonight. Please, please, please. There is another meeting at 1. Hopefully this one will tell us something useful. But i hate to get my hopes up. I am not a patient person and this is wearing on my nerves. We were planning on going somewhere today, getting outta town and distracting ourselves, but this news makes us hesitant. So we'll wait and clock watch and if all goes well get back in tonight. Kiss lady luck for me if you see her.

clockwatchers

2007-07-09T09:30:00.000-06:00

Our driveway

Now the waiting game.
As nice as lounging in a hotel room is after months of field work, we're bored, ready to get back out there. But most of our supplies, clothes, and equipment are back at the house. Rumor has it that it will be a few more days before we get back in.
The fire is still out of control and erratic winds make everything uncertain.

Light my fire

2007-07-08T14:56:00.000-06:00

So last night I'm trying, again, to fix the plumbing on the field house, it's not working so i decide to give up and get the cheat grass out of my shoes. There's a storm blowing in and i relax under a tree and enjoy the breeze.
Something is wrong, off, strange.
Instead of wet hot dirt, i smell grass and wood. Burning grass and wood. The sky is overcast and the sun is going down so i'm not sure if there is any smoke, but i smell it.
Sure enough, a short while later there is a huge boiling smoke cloud North of us. But it's a few miles off and fire is a fact of life out here, so we don't sweat it too much. We update the backed-up data and read a book.
Few hours later it's still burning, you can see the red glow over the ridge even though it's now about 11 pm. But it doesn't seemed to have moved much and the smoke is blowing east instead of south where we are. So i go to sleep, but I think ahead enough to set my alarm for two hours later. Death from smoke inhalation doesn't sound appealing to me.
I wake before the alarm goes off. Look out the window and what to my wandering eyes should appear but a raging fire moving right down the ridge.
Time to go.
I wake up C and we begin to hurriedly pack up the essentials. Wallet, check. Cell phone, check. Laptop, check. Samples on ice, check. Of course, in our haste we pick up a few needless things, the printer?, banding kits?, empty water bottles?. But forget some essentials, phone charger, toothbrush, actual data sheets.
As we're finishing up the fire crew comes tearing down the drive. Seriously, time to go.
At the end of the drive we look back up the canyon and see the flames eating their way up and down the preserve. Ever seen a wildfire hit a juniper? Very impressive what with flames over 30 ft in the air and all.
So we skeedattle, but we can't head north into town b/c the fire has jumped the road and it's gnarly (direct quote from fire crew). So we have to head south to nothing. Seriously, nothing, for over 70 miles, then you come to a tiny town in Nebraska. No room at the inn.
So we pull over on the side of the road and watch the world burn for awhile. Happy B-day C, never forget this one will you? Then, we decide to loop around the long way and go to the red cross shelter the locals told us about. 60 miles away, most of it on gravel, and it's about 3am now. woohooo.
We finally get there, but now there's the problem of the precious, precious samples we've slaved to gather over the last two months. They are fragile and must stay frozen or it's all been for naught.
A kind soul at the shelter offers the freezer space at his church and next thing we know we're in the basement of some random church with the preacher's son tucking away the samples at 4:30 am. Life is very strange sometimes.
By the time we're settled on our cots at the convention center/red cross shelter it's after 5.
We pass out for a little while then get up before 7 to see what we can find out.
The morning is spent twiddling our thumbs and listening to the locals talk about the destruction before we hear that our place is somehow still standing. The fire stopped at the edge of the driveway, missed the house by scant meters. Things are such a mess down there though it will be days before we can get back in.
So now we're at a hotel room in town with hot running water, electricity, wireless internet and cable.
A night of pure luxury after a hot, ashy, dirty, sweaty, anxious, LONG, day before.

feel it hot hot hot

2007-07-06T14:43:00.000-06:00

It's hot out here.
Very, very hot and very, very dry.
The last estimate i saw was around 107.
Fun climate for field work.
We come home and finish processing the blood. Time to shower and relax.
C goes first, i heat up some dinner. I try to add a little water to the bowl before nuking it but no water comes out of the tap. Great. C comes down from her shower and says it stopped on her mid shower.
I love plumbing.
This old place was a weird set up, the water well is about 50m away and the water is pumped into the house via a black temporary pipe on the ground. So on days like today the cold water is too hot to use, seriously scalding.
So i go out and follow the pipe and sure enough there's a connector that's blown.
So i spend the next hour grunting and tugging and trying to use a swiss army knife screwdriver (it's all i had). In the end it still leaks a little so we leave the water off and I just deal with no shower, despite being caked with mud and the devilish cheat grass.
A wet wash cloth is your friend and savior.