Hi all, sorry it's been a while - trying to get my Masters thesis written, while also attending my PhD conference has taken up a lot of my time in the last couple of weeks.
Time for a fun one: it's fieldwork time. I would just like to start by saying that anyone who goes out into the field for data collection without any issues along the way, is probably doing it wrong! If you're reading this when feeling fed up because your surveys, playbacks or whatever-it-is-you're-trying-to-do is going wrong, please DO NOT BEAT YOURSELF UP! This is just what fieldwork is and it's the screw ups that make for all the best stories when you come home.
So that's what I'm going to tell you about: some of my greatest fieldwork fails and my top tips for how to cope when it seems like everything is going against you. I've had the enormous privilege being able to spend a lot of time in the field so far considering my career stage. Despite not yet having even started my PhD, I've already spent almost two years abroad collecting data and observing a whole range of species. I've made the most incredible memories and plenty of fantastic mistakes!
In the summer of 2019, I headed out to Australia for three months of fieldwork for my Masters. My study species, the Chestnut-Crowned Babbler (Pomatostomus ruficeps), is a 50 g passerine bird found only in the outback. It is an obligate cooperative breeder, meaning that young males remain with their parents and help them to raise future broods. For some more information on them, check out Russell et al., 2010 and Russell, 2016, which I've included at the bottom. My project is about determining the function of a call these birds make when they enter a nest containing chicks. For my fieldwork I was looking to observe the behaviour of adults during their natural foraging away from the nest, and perform playback experiments to nestlings to test their response to the call of interest and some other babbler calls.
Much as they are fascinating birds, they are also incredibly fearful of humans, which makes them a massive pain to try and study. As soon as you come within 20 m of them, they start threat calling and fly away, but any further and you can't hear their quieter calls. They also have an incredible ability to just vanish, and I mean vanish, into thin air. That's bad enough. Then add in a broken car, trying to learn how to set up a mist net in extreme wind (it's difficult enough in still weather), spending hours wandering the territories for hours without finding any birds, and discovering that I possess the electrical-device-destroying-power of an EMP. Total nightmare. For my playback experiments I had nests that failed (including two where I spent 90 minutes playing calls only to later discover that the nests were empty), equipment that seemed determined to break repeatedly, and the birds changed their behaviour so much I was constantly having to alter my experimental procedure. The best of all (and feel free to laugh at me for this!) there was the time I accidentally skipped song on the iPod I was using and instead of playing a nice little set of babbler calls, what did I blast at the chicks at full volume from right outside the nest? Ed Sheeran! Don't get me wrong, I love a good bit of Galway Girl, but mid-playback next to chicks that are liable to try and jump out of their 15 m high nest at the merest fright, I can certainly do without Nancy Mulligan. Ed, if you ever read this - I love your music, but I'm sorry to say that Chestnut-Crowned Babblers are not such fans! Luckily they didn't jump.
So there you go - probably my lowest ever moment for feeling utterly stupid, and like the worst researcher ever to set foot in the research station. Here's where we come to my top tips for surviving the frustrations of fieldwork. (To clarify - once I'd worked out my technical issues and playback protocol, I did manage to get a decent amount of footage and some successful experiments.)
- SMILE AND LAUGH IT OFF! This is the big one - obviously you need to take failures seriously to avoid repeating mistakes, but the most important thing in the field is to keep your head up. Fieldwork is TOUGH, especially when you're far from home, and the worst thing you can do is spend hours dwelling on your mistakes. Smile. Shake it off. Learn from it.
- Find something to laugh about, and people to laugh with. Despite everything I've said so far, my three months in Australia were amazing - we had so many laughs and it was just brilliant. Guys - you know who you are and you made fieldwork fantastic! We did everything from cooking pancakes to dissecting a dead eagle that we found by the road. Nights around the fire to frying pan tennis/baseball in the kitchen. We were a team and I knew that no matter what went wrong, they were there for me.
- Have someone to vent at away from the field site. No matter who the people around you are, you also need to talk to other people, both for yourself and to avoid getting them down too. Being in Australia with my family back in the UK wasn't easy, but actually a 4:30am start helps with the jet lag!
- Routines help you keep on top of everything - fieldwork is very rarely simple, and if you aren't busy all the time then you could probably be collecting a lot more data. Making sure that every day you collect, input and check your data help to avoid mistakes and quickly spot if there is a problem with the collection methods. It also means you work efficiently and can make the time for the critical rounds of beer pong or dancing along to your favourite song as loud as you like - seriously, it helps! (Also find that song that always cheers you up: for me it was Wizzard "I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day" because I'm a total child, or anything from The Greatest Showman.)
- Check all of your equipment before you start, to avoid playing loud and bouncy pop music at poor terrified baby birds... or indeed, to avoid anything going wrong with it: speakers randomly switching off or disconnecting from bluetooth, cameras running out of battery, dead radios meaning you can't hear your instructions... if technology can break, it always will at the worst moment. Fact.
- Don't pay a fortune for high quality field clothing... Before I first went to Africa, I had to buy an entire new wardrobe because I owned nothing fawn-coloured, so I went mostly to charity shops but also got a couple of new things. Now, after 17 months in Africa and 3 months in the outback, the charity shop stuff is still going strong and I winced a lot more at tearing my expensive new clothes than I did at the charity shop stuff! Everyone likes the occasional new thing, but seriously don't bother before going to the field. It won't last any longer and you'll pay 10x the price!
RUSSELL, AF., Portelli, DJ., Russell, DJF., and Barclay, H., 2010. Breeding ecology of the chestnut-crowned babbler: A cooperative breeder in the desert. Emu, 110: 324-331.
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