This past week was probably one of the most exciting of my academic career. From watching live cams of cheetah births, feeding scimitar horned oryx, hunting for salamanders, catching frogs, and tramping through the woods in search of Kenneth the box turtle. It’s been a week full of hands-on opportunities, new experiences, and skills.
Can you believe I had never seen a salamander in the wild before this week? Granted I don’t think we have a single salamander in the Virgin Islands. Or that bull frog tadpoles are the size of a small clementine? We found eastern newts which might singularly be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. There is so much life in the woods, in the stagnant little ponds, than you might expect. If you know where to look and how to look, it’s all around you.
But they definitely aren’t always easy to find as we learned with Kenneth the box turtle. Using radio telemetry, we spent easily two hours trying to locate the half foot long little turtle in the expanse of woods. What a sight we must have been bumbling through the woods waving around metal and rubber hand-held antennas listening to beeps from the receivers. Only to find that the turtle was in the heart of the largest thicket of thorns in a mile radius. In the end, the sense of accomplishment of finding Kenneth with the little rubber transmitter epoxied to his shell was marvelous.
At the beginning of the SMSC program, we were told that we would learn conservation the way conservation is practiced. The nitty gritty of data production, analysis, and implementation. And they have held true to their word. Collecting field data, being out in the woods doing real science, using the techniques that you hear about in the media and in classes. It makes a life and a career in conservation seem attainable. It gives us confidence, an identity as conservationists.
The narrative around careers in conservation and environmental science is rather negative. I’ve heard all of the “it’s a lost cause” and “you’ll never make any money”. It’s honestly a difficult field to pursue. It is not just a job. Because the money part is unfortunately partly true. You will make money, but rarely will it be comparable to the amount of work you put in. The difficulty there is that you will always be able to find a job since demand is so high, but the funding just isn’t what it should be. So to pursue conservation it has to be a passion driven career. You have to have motivation outside of money. There has to be enough of a sense of accomplishment for bushwhacking for two hours to find a turtle in a thorn bush. There has to be a bit of idealistic hope in the face of negative messages that often attract the most attention.
The other false narrative around conservation is that you have to be a scientist. There is no one way conservation is supposed to look. Literally any skill can be applied to protect species and the environment. You’re an artist? Design species art that gets people to pay attention and interact. You love coding and IT? Conservation needs people to develop algorithms and models to guide practices, technology to make data collection and transfer easier. I genuinely ask you, the reader, to see how whatever skills, hobbies, jobs you have can be applied to conservation. Conservation is limitless. Every person is important.
I always had a very narrow view of my opportunities in the field that I knew I loved. Research, politics, or communication. Goodness was I wrong. I didn’t expect to enjoy the radio tracking as much as I did. It was like a puzzle, a treasure hunt. And then there is Geographic information systems (GIS) which is essentially mapmaking. GIS is also something I never expected to enjoy as much as I am. It’s a nightmare for perfectionism, but it’s like sitting down at a computer and drawing in the coloring book of the world. It allows us new ways to interact, perceive, and interpret our environment. There are so many patterns and new things to learn when we just change our perspective.
I could endlessly pontificate in excited nerd, but I am thrilled at all of these new opportunities SMSC has shown me. It’s a little overwhelming to have so many ideas, so many options floating around in my head. I was hoping to have a narrower direction for grad school after this program, but so far it has done just the opposite. And perhaps that’s not a bad thing.