Tell us a fieldwork success story!
Ask A Biologist Monday 11/29/21
Back in my tech days, right after I learned to trap black bear, I managed to catch my first bear: a HUGE male that easily weighed 500lbs! Our scale only went up to 450lbs and one of his paws was still resting on the ground. It was so exciting!
Answers from Biologists:
Deconstructing a weather station without the correct tools.
Eating ramen noodles at 1am after spending 6 hours following a radio-tagged lemur.
Hand digging a buried albatross chick out of a snowdrift.
Found the northern spotted owl nest that 3 coworkers had looked for.
Found 4 whooping cranes on a site my park managers wanted to open to ATVs.
Effectively using radio telemetry to track Gila trout.
Got to be on an episode of Wildlife Nation with Jeff Corwin.
Found a cutthroat population on a forest we thought all the pops were accounted for.
Collared 19 caribou calves in one day via helicopter darting.
Spent 2 months searching for Lesser yellowlegs nests. Found 2 the day before they hatched.
Banded 166 endangered Red-cockaded woodpecker chicks in one nesting season.
Didn’t panic when I was pushed around by a manatee my students thought was a Bull shark.
Convinced our archaeologist and local Tribes to designate the Phillips agave as a cultural resource.
Hiked down 4 large timber rattlesnakes to add to my radio tracked sample in one (long) day.
Tracked a bobcat to its exact location and remote downloaded points.
Used shower curtain rods as mist net poles for bat research. Worked great in a pinch!
Setting up my bat detector-electronics are not my forte, so a proud moment.
Finding one last ovenbird nest when I was about to give up hope because it looked old.
Finished the entire day without anyone being stung by a hornet.
Slipped in a yucky pond with a bat in hand, but the bat didn’t get wet. Just me!
Finding wolf dens to cross-foster captive born pups into wild dens.
Found the elusive AIS we were searching for on lunch while looking for cool rocks.
Working with the aggregate industry and Bank Swallows. I was so nervous but by the end of the field season a few operators were interested in creating site plans.
Got my facility designated as an arboretum.
We messed up the planned material design so had to re-design it on the spot, which actually turned out to be a better method than the original!
