Last summer, something unbelievable happened to me. While attending the final banquet of an ornithology conference, I won the raffle prize. Now, if you’re like me, winning anything is already a pretty amazing stroke of luck. But this wasn’t just any raffle prize: I won a 3-week cruise to Antarctica. Honestly, it felt like my life’s entire allotment of luck, all in one fell swoop. It was so phenomenally fortunate, in fact, that I told…

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This week on Dispatches on the Field, to keep up with the Twitter trends, we thought it would be fun to highlight just a few of the awesome blogs written by women in the past 2 years sharing their fieldwork experiences. Check out their posts and follow them on Twitter! @HannaBensch Happy damselfly catching in Sweden     @TaraImlay The challenges and joys of being a parent in the field     @MVKingsbury It’s not just…

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One of the most important rules for fieldwork is to never enter the field alone. This is partly for safety reasons, but also for your sanity. When you conduct fieldwork in remote places, as I do, it is essential to have a buddy. But when your interview process involves explaining to potential applicants that they have a high likelihood of winding up covered in bird poop most days, it can be a challenge to find…

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When I started doing fieldwork about 12 years ago, I didn’t use technology in the field. In fact, the only technology I had access to was an old flip phone that took photos so blurry I could barely tell if they were of plants or animals when I got back to the lab. I didn’t even pre-print my Excel data sheets and fill them in as I collected data. I just drew freehand columns in…

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The prisoner looks up at us from his metal enclosure.  Huddled in a corner, he freezes against the wall, hoping we haven’t seen him.  But as the beam of our flashlight comes to rest on him, he’s gone.  With a flip of his wings, he dives beneath the surface of the shallow pool, disappearing into the shadows of the enclosure. “Well, crap,” says one of my companions.  “He’s not going to be easy to rescue.”…

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Five years ago over beers at the Grad Club, the three of us decided to start a blog. The purpose of the blog was to share stories about fieldwork: why we love it, why we keep doing it, and why everyone should get the chance to experience it. At that point in time, two of us were knee deep (or maybe neck deep??) in PhD fieldwork and the third was managing a lab, which included…

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We often say the best part about fieldwork is getting to go to places that most other people don’t get to see. But sometimes we conduct fieldwork in locations that the public is able to visit too. The welcome sign to the park. I was very busy this past year with starting my doctorate degree. This included learning French, taking classes (in French), reading and writing literature reviews, and planning experiments. So I was super…

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My lungs are bursting as I stumble to a halt, slipping on melting snow crystals.  Squinting against the glare, I lift my head – and immediately wish I hadn’t.  Behind me, a vertigo-inducing slope of snow drops away.  In front of me, the sight is even worse: the slope continues up…up…up.  At the top, four figures stand waiting impatiently.  It’s clear that I’m hopelessly outclassed. As I force myself to start climbing again, I can’t…

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One of the reasons Amanda, Sarah, and I started this blog five years ago (!) is because we wanted to use stories to share some of the amazing places field biologists get to work – places that often aren’t accessible to everyone.  And over the years, we’ve highlighted a lot of stories from these places, from Sable Island to Line P in the Pacific Ocean to an uninhabited islet in Cape Verde. But you don’t…

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This week Dispatches from the Field is happy to welcome Megan Quinn, the Coordinator of Conservation Biology for Eastern Ontario with the Nature Conservancy of Canada to share how she ended up working for the environment. Most people working in conservation have a story about how they got into the field. In my case, environmental work wasn’t my first, second, or even fifth career choice, but it did turn out to be my favourite. Although…

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