Curious to know what your first real long-term field experience might be like?  

Follow my former student Melanie (La Suerte, summer 2012) as she begins her first real field assistantship: 5 months studying anti-predator behavior and vocalizations in the white-handed gibbons of Khao Yai National Park in Thailand

(and yes, she acknowledges that gibbons are not, in fact, monkeys…).

Her blog is already off to a most excellent start: plenty of gibbon photos, predator experiments, and great pictures of a cobra trying to eat another snake!

Hardcore, Melanie.  Keep your feet dry, and keep up the awesome work!

amnhnyc:

Surveying for rare animals in foreign forests is challenging. Doing it at night is a whole other level of difficult. 

Follow along as researcher Mary Blair of the Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation searches for pygmy and Bengal slow lorises in Vietnam.

Pictured: A Bengal slow loris, photographed in 2010 at the Endangered Primate Rescue Center, Cuc Phuong National Park, Vietnam // Nolan Bett

Go Mary! Find those lorises!

Strange but strong intimacies are the hallmarks of field friendships.

When separated from friends and loved ones in the isolated wilderness, the new bonds you form can be both powerfully intense and inappropriately close by conventional standards, and seem downright bizarre when described out of context.

You know better, though.  

These are some of the truest connections, the soul-touching bonds to other human beings that make friendship worthwhile…

These may include:

1) Chortled commiserations regarding any of the following: a) rectal bleeding, b) the state of one’s fecal consistency and color, c) urine problems, or d) discharge of any kind.

2) Inspecting each other for parasites, which eventually may include the difficult yet hilariously fascinating task of aiding in the extraction of several ticks from delicates not your own. (Those things get everywhere… everywhere.)

3) Taking turns kicking the bloated and steaming corpse of a cow to marvel at the spectacle of vultures, flying as if newly born, from its half-eaten anus (they just keep coming…). Then looking at each other and knowing, without having to say a word, that you will wait together so that you can watch them crawl back inside.

4) Maintaining eye contact - and I will neither confirm nor deny that hands were held, as well - while mutually defecating in the forest. Just to see if you can stand it. Which you can, but just barely. (And please, try not to laugh so hard while pooping in the future… it’s exceedingly strange in both sensation and outcome.)

Revel in these moments.

Cherish these intimacies.

You may find neither friends nor friendships like this ever again.

Dedicated to my lovely darkling. You know who you are…

Things I Learned as a Field Biologist #294

One day, you may notice that one of your mosquito bites has begun to hurt… like a needle being pushed insistently and repeatedly into your skin. As the days pass by, the poking becomes more intense, and the pain a bit deeper, and the bump is beginning to grow…

When you look more closely at the offending bite, you may see something mildly horrifying: a small proboscis, wetly reaching out for air, before disappearing quickly back into a tiny, suppurating hole in your skin.

Congratulations.

You have a botfly.

Pay attention now, here’s what you should do:

1) DO NOT JUST LET IT GO.

I know you’re tempted… we’ve all been there: “Something is parasitizing me in a most vile and disgusting manner?! Let’s leave it alone and see what it does!” But this is just not acceptable. It’s gross. And I think by now we should all know that it cannot turn out well.

If you doubt me, see the above video (in which several friends and I can be seen having a beer while contemplating the spectacle - and biceps - of someone NOT paying attention to point 1 above).

2) Name it.

Naming things makes them marginally less disgusting. My first botfly was called Fergie (after someone whose vocal presence roughly approximates the feeling of being stabbed by a needle over and over again).

3) Kill it.

Killing a botfly is fairly simple. To suffocate the bot, a bit of duct tape can be applied to the bite area. I recommend also putting a bit of vaseline directly over the air hole, to deprive it of even the remotest possibility of breathing and thus continuing to feed off of my bodily fluids. Some try to coax the bot out using either positive stimuli (raw meat) or negative stimuli (tobacco, cigarette butts), but this beats around the bush. Just kill it. 

Why kill it, you may ask?  Well, dear friend, because this is what it looks like. Every time you try to extract it while alive, it will dig in with those spikes (see video above for an example of a difficult live birth - and more biceps).

4) Birth it.

Once the bot is dead (it usually takes a day or two using the duct tape method), you get to extract the corpse! This is the best part. I typically use a standard snake bite suction kit. Simply latch on, and increase the suction by pushing in the plunger. Naturally, because of the spikes, this will take a while, and more suction than one might expect, but the results are spectacular and not a little satisfying. Soon you’ll have a bloody, pussy explosion inside the cup! Birth!

5) Save it.

Be sure to rifle through the schrapnel of your bot’s explosive parturition to find the bot, because now that it’s no longer feeding on your vital fluids, it’s actually really frakking awesome (and looks incredible in a small test tube on the mantle).

a-mongrel:

i was just telling my friends that they should shave this way.

This.

But with a machete.

a-mongrel:

fairy-wren:

This Northern Shrike did not enjoy his banding experience **blood does not belong to the shrike**

(photo by Sam Bobbing)

gottah be a bamf to band

The worst I ever got was a monkey urinating directly into my mouth at point blank range while I was hanging by my thighs on a small tree four meters from the ground above My #1 Favorite Lesbian Field Assistant.

But that’s a story for another time…

(monkey pee: not terrible, just a little warm)

Human innovation is truly boundless.

Especially when it comes to the excretion of bodily waste in less-than-civilized conditions.

1) Ladies.

2) Everyone.

You are welcome.

(with a special shout out to my old friend, without whom amoebic dysentery could have been so much worse…)

You will most definitely, at some point, defecate in the forest.

It is very important that you understand the completely unavoidable nature of this eventuality.

Attempting to avoid defecating in the forest may lead to any number of less than desirable outcomes, including:

1) You will defecate on yourself.

You may think you can make it back to camp.

Your amoebic dysentery disagrees.

Listen to your amoebic dysentery.

2) You will defecate somewhere inappropriate (other than on yourself).

Once you are desperate enough, you may defecate not far from where you were walking, just to get it over with.  If this is the case…please. Bury your feces. Finding human feces near a trail or even in the middle of the forest makes something deep inside the finder curl into the fetal position and cry out weakly at the apparent dissolution of all that is good in this world.

And trust me.

Everyone knows that came from a human…

And there are only so many humans out here…

3) You will not defecate, and in so doing you will ruin defecation.

Perhaps it’s your first time in the field, and you have the tight anal sphincter of a 17-year-old athlete. Your ravenous appetite has left you full to bursting, but you most definitely do not want people to find your leavings (see 2, above). So you hold it. Given your willpower, lack of applicable parasites, age, and fear of social embarrassment, that poop isn’t going anywhere.

Nor will it for quite some time.

Because the longer you hold in that fecal matter, the more compact it becomes.

Months after returning from the field, you may notice that you’re a little off your game. You can’t run as fast as you used to, and when you try you get horrible cramps. You’re tired all the time, and cranky. And pooping just isn’t what it used to be.

When you finally go to the doctor, he’ll take an x-ray. To the surprise of both of you, your colon will appear as a solid block of light. It is radiant with the dried, impacted, months-old fecal matter caked to its lining, almost completely preventing you from resorbing water and nutrients.

After a rather lengthy weekend involving the simultaneous use of three (three!) types of laxative, you are on your way to a full recovery, and ready to put your impacted colon behind you.

From this day forward, however, you will never win an argument against your father without him reminding you that you were, at one point at least, quite literally full of shit.

So please. Even if it’s uncomfortable. Even it there are mosquitos eating you alive. Even if there are no soft leaves in sight (but that’s ok because you should be collecting every large, thick, velvety leaf you come across throughout the day).

Poop.

Because holding it in can never end well.

Yes.

(via lostlobo)

Things I Learned as a Field Biologist #9

Snakes.

Snakes are beautiful creatures, undeserving of the scorn often heaped on them.

But one breezy evening early in the dry season, you may be quietly following the monkeys. The sun is low in the sky, and everyone is slowly settling in for the evening. The monkeys have been spotting and harassing two or three rattlesnakes daily - it’s the dry season, after all - but it’s ok because that warning is always there, you can follow the steady mobbing to its cold, beautiful, and safely distant reptilian source. At any rate, there’s nothing to worry about now… you’re on a gravel road with high visibility, there are no long grasses, and the monkeys are calm and drowsing. They always see the snakes before you do. So you stroll on. Looking up.

Until you hear something.

Something that makes you look down.

A terrifying high-speed rattle.

And a split second later, out of the corner of your eye, you see it.

It is directly between your feet.

Its mouth is open.

Its head is up.

Rearing back.

Striking.

The next thing you know, you’re on your back, a full five feet away from where you’d just been standing. Your heart is pounding out of your chest as the monkeys alarm wildly at the four-foot-long rattlesnake that, just now, narrowly missed a direct strike at your delicates.

It’s ok.

Take a deep breath (and then take another).

Scold the monkeys for, this once, having missed a snake in plain sight.

And prepare for a lifetime of helpless chagrin.

Because from this moment forward, despite knowing that they will not harm you unless you absolutely ask for it, you will never see a snake (or upset a snake-sized branch in the leaf litter) again without daintily crumpling your limbs, catching your breath in your throat, and emitting the most delicate, the most timorous, the most tremulous of squeals.