Hasta

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

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

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

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

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....

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

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

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

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.