Getting There

My trip to CR was a bit of an adventure: I had two flights with an overnight layover in between. On my first flight, I was blessed with the company of Jerry (?), a rather inebriated Brazilian truck driver from Taunton. We chatted for most of the flight before he submitted to a hangover before landing. I also befriended a girl from Boston on her way to CR to spend her vacation volunteering with Sea Turtles, and a nice retired guy in the process of moving to CR. Thanks to some research (shoutout to sleepinginairports.com), I knew that the Orlando airport was not a bad place to crash; after all, I would have to be up and about less than five hours later. I found a nice padded bench in the food court (which was full of people with similar intentions) and zonked out for the night. On my second flight, I sat between some professional cyclists on their way home from a meet and a group of Orlandeans ready to party in Costa Rica. I took a taxi to the bus terminal I needed (I decided to spend a little extra to avoid an afternoon of bus terminal roulette with luggage), hopped on one two minutes to departure, and was on my way to Puerto Viejo! I was a little paranoid about not ending up in Puerto Viejo de Limon (where the tourists go) and instead making my way to Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui, especially after the ticket clerk acted dubious and triple-checked that I knew where I wanted to go. However, I had boarded the right bus, and was met shortly after my arrival by Michelle, my new boss.

I recieved a driving tour of the surrounding towns as we made our way to the house. It's a very cute little two-bedroom cottage, with tile floors and a papaya tree outside. There is a mare with a young foal just beyond our backyard fence, and I am entirely enamored with them. I unpacked, spent most of the afternoon dozing and studying up the project, had a beer with a researcher friend of Michelle's, and went to bed early.

Alive and at My New Base Costa Rica

Title says it. It's lovely here. Time for rest now, more updates to come.

How to Gain Experience and Employment as an Ecology / Wildlife Biology Field Research Technician

Probably the most frequently-asked question I receive whenever I meet new people or discuss my employment is:

"Where do you find jobs like that?"

The question isn't so much where to find them-- more often than not, it's pretty easy to find job postings for international or domestic field research. The harder part (for most of the people asking, anyway), is getting the basic qualifications that get you in the door.

The primary things that help you get a field research job are:

• Having already completed a field season of research
• Good references (professional references that can speak to your experience and your enthusiasm and character are best)
• Having training in the specific field techniques used in the project
• Having or working towards a relevant degree (pretty much anything in the natural or environmental sciences, or even statistics or programming, will do as long as you have relevant courses that show your interest and perhaps some practical training)

Helpful attributes to get a position abroad include:

• Having already lived or worked abroad in the region
• Having participated in field research abroad
• Demonstrated your ability to work in particularly harsh and unpredictable conditions
• Foreign language skills

This is a pretty difficult field to break into for your first few projects-- no one wants to risk their personal research on a technician that might turn out to be moody, sloppy, indifferent, or generally hazardous! The best way to get your foot in the door is:

Volunteer on at least one project doing something that interests you.

If you are an undergraduate-level student, find a professor that does field research. Volunteer your time and effort for a summer. You may miss out on a paying summer job-- whether you can afford to do that is up to you (I couldn't, as an undergrad). If you can swing it, spend your summers helping professors out.

If you can't find a professor at your university (the personal touch is always a good one), try volunteering for a similar position found on a job board.

Study abroad

As an undergrad, I couldn't well afford to take summers off to work unpaid jobs. I could, however, swing a semester abroad where my financial aid still applied. Research your options, talk to your study abroad office. If you want to grow up to do international field research, find a program that specializes in giving undergraduates international field research experience.

I highly recommend Round River Conservation Studies for an immersive, hard-core, research-based study abroad experience. I was able to work on actual conservation projects (see below) in Namibia for a full semester. With the help of a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, it cost me and my family less than it would have to keep my at my home university, including airfare. School for Field Studies offers similar (but broader) programs.

Commit for a real period of time to a real project

I see plenty of "volunteer for two weeks and pay our research station $600/week in housing"-type positions. That sounds like a fine vacation if you have the time and money and just want to cuddle orangutans (who doesn't!?), but two weeks isn't going to convince anybody that you're a hard worker, and you could probably spend your money better. Remember that a typical field season lasts 3-4 months, often much longer.

It's quite understandable that a research station might want to recoup some of its expenses on volunteers, but I would expect that a project using me as a volunteer would recoup those costs through my labor and not my money. Be cautious about programs that seem to take volunteers on as a source of income: make sure that you will be trained in the skills you want to acquire and not just treated as a vacationer!

Take note of the skills required for jobs you'd like someday

If you want to work with large mammals, you will need handling and trapping experience, a course in chemical immobilization, possibly some tracking training, and probably some experience with radio telemetry. If you want to work with birds, you will likely need lots and lots of mist-netting extraction and handling experience, experience with visual and sound identification, etc. Pay attention to skills and techniques that you would like to acquire, and select projects where you can be trained in those methods.

List of Job Boards

Here are a list of my favorite sites for seeking jobs and volunteer opportunities in ecology and wildlife biology:

• Texas A&M Wildlife and Fisheries Job Board -- The biggest wildlife job board around
• Society for Conservation Biology Job Board -- A lot of overlap with the TAMU job board, but with some preferential and exclusive posts and a more narrow focus
• AZA Job Board -- Lots of animal husbandry internships, but a research-focused internship or job pops up every once in awhile
• ECOLOG Listserve -- Academic ecology email list, with lots of graduate research opportunities and some research technician opportunities posted frequently.

Recommended Reading

• Prof. Eric Walters' "The Top 5 Mistakes That Biology Undergraduate Students Make When Preparing For Field Positions in Biology"
• "Field Biology Jobs" by Dr. Alan Krakauer

New Adventure on the Horizon

Hello all! It's been awhile since I last updated my poor travel log (which I admittedly neglected a bit during my last project). I'll make an effort to update with  my best photos-- sorting through them all and backing up my favorites has been a very time-consuming task!

My next project is working with herps, a term I'm already informed makes laypersons think of "herpes simplex" before "herpetile" or "herpetofauna." Same greek root, you guys!

Greek: ἑρπετόν, hereton, "creeping animal" [Wikipedia]

Most of my fieldwork thus far has focused on mammals and the herbaceous matrix we find them in, so this will be quite the treat to play with a new taxon! I grew up catching leopard frogs and shuttling garter snakes off the road, so I'll be tapping back into adolescent herp-hunting mode.

And most excitingly, this project is in...

Costa Rica!

Woohoo! This project is a great fit, considering my goals to conduct international fieldwork, work with many taxa, and progress with my passable Spanish skills.

I will be flying out next week (still need to pack and sort out a multitude of details!), and will be back by Christmas. I'm spending this week catching up with friends and family, reformatting and repairing my long-suffering travel netbook, sewing up the holes in my bags, cleaning the family homes, and finalizing my packing list. More updates to come!

First juvenile capture of the season!

Myotis septentrionalis,
Northern long-eared bat

Arkansan Adventures

I am presently working as a bat survey research technician— I am part of a crew hired by a local university which was hired by the Forest Service to look for federally and locally endangered bats. The Forest Service, in order to comply with the Endangered Species Act, is obligated to (and probably wants to) find out whether there are any endangered species in a region before they do any controlled burns, logging, or other sorts of disruptions that could hurt any endangered populations.

That’s where we come in—as a crew of bat biologists and ecologists, we root around designated areas of the national forests to try to find the federally endangered Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis). Because we are trying to find any M. sodalist that might be roosting in the area, we aren’t netting in a grid or other system with predetermined locations, as one might if looking for an unbiased sample of species in the area. Instead, we rely on our understanding of bat ecology, behavior, known populations, topography, and local weather conditions to get inside the bats’ heads and try to find sites where they will be. Bats love partly-covered “flyways” through the forest along trails or roads, and sometimes have to fly long distances to the nearest source of water to drink, for example.

Most of our surveys are two nights per site, so our work day can start as early as 3pm if we are out scouting for sites to set up, or as late as 7pm if we are continuing netting at a nearby site. We net for five hours after sunset, so we close our nets between 1 and 2am as the summer progresses. Quite a lifestyle shift from getting up at 5am to catch rodents in Chiapas!

Catching up

Hello readers! I have a bit of catching you up to do:

- After concluding our mammal / coffee work, we research techs traveled together to San Cristobal de Las Casas, a beautiful and cosmopolitan little hippy city in the mountains of the Sierra Madre. We hung around there for a week, bumming around youth hostels and seeing the sites with lots of new friends from around the world. Week done, my travel buddies flew out; I popped up to see the ruins of Palenque, down to see the regionally famous zoo in Tuxtla Guiterrez, back to San Cristobal, and then to the airport to fly home!

- I had almost four weeks to fit in some serious R&R, visits to friends and family, and then cleaning and packing up for my next adventure project! The weeks flew by, and as is usual for these short visits home, I was left in a hurry to see as many people as I could and to get everything on my to-do list done.

- I spent three days to drive the twenty-four hours from my family's home to the Arkansas Ozarks, a beautiful and hilly/mountainous region that greeted me with deluges of rain and a very chilly first night. I managed to set up my roomy living-out-of-my-car tent before sunset, had dinner with my colleagues who had arrived at the public campsite before I, and snuggled into my sleeping bag under several layers of clothing for a very, very early night.

More on what I'll be doing here in AR soon!