Another year, another species of orangutan, and another bunch of complete pillocks put in charge of biodiversity hotspots (pillock 1, pillock 2). Here are some of my favourite (and worst) moments of 2018, in no particular order.
I supposed the biggest thing was graduating from Sheffield Uni with a Master’s in Zoology. Unfortunately, I was on the wrong island for the ceremony, so had to have my own Borneo-style jungle graduation, accessorised with a microfibre towel cloak and a hat made from a bin bag and a box of Branflakes.
Things went downhill from there.
First I ended up in hospital with food poisoning, severe dehydration, a bladder infection and infections in both my ears — impressively all at once — proving once and for all to my mum that fieldwork isn’t just an excuse to ponce around the forest, or, at least, that poncing around the forest can come at a price.
Then we suffered a series of broken machetes.
A night of hammocking in forest disrupted by a herd of elephants.
Then followed by a month of difficulties accessing our fields site due to collapsed bridges, overgrown roads and a series of complications incited by the election of a new Malaysian government.
Finally, things picked up, we arrived at our field site, one of the most beautiful places on Earth…and proceeded to machete 25 km of rainforest trails in record time to create a network of paths that will be used over the next few decades to explore how vine-cutting could speed up the regeneration of heavily logged rainforest.
Back just in time for my 23rd Birthday, I wrote a list of things I wanted to accomplish by the time I’m 24 and then went we off in search of marmots, ibex, golden eagles and lynx in the French Alps.
We found the Ibex: this is me looking at them.
We were inundated with eagles and marmots
But the only lynx we found was in a tiny run-down museum in the arse-crack of nowhere.
Fortunately, at this museum, we also got chatting in rusty french to the nicest and quite possibly strangest man in France, and probably the Northern hemisphere.
And so it was that for what was without doubt the oddest week of my life, we gallivanted around the Alps with a 70-something year old amateur lepidopterist who lived alone in a dingy hut with 300,000 dead moths and butterflies and bats stored in Monopoly boxes, catching moths on melting glaciers, staring endlessly at butterfly willies down the microscope, eating dead insects cooked in red-wine sauce for dinner, and drinking dangerously potent homemade juniper gin with avalanche rescue teams in mountain Sheppard huts.
Oh, and in what was without a doubt our most Silence of the Lambs moment of 2018, we also hunted for moths by an abandoned farmhouse strewn with stale dog turds.
Some wild swimming.
And a bit of wild camping.
And then it was back to England for my first RGS-Explore Weekend, which I absolutely loved and cannot wait to return to next year! One day I will apply to their awesome Land Rover Bursary.
Three weeks in Madagascar climbing trees to sample canopy frogs.
A couple of days of scrambling frantically to write a last-minute PhD proposal (would not recommend doing this, and prioritising the writing of this blog post over completing an impending application deadline is also pretty foolish)…
And then yesterday, on the last day of the year, on the cusp of 2019,
and following an article about clouded leopards, logged forests and using crap to catch bugs, it was announced that I was the winner of the Terra Inconita Wildlife Blogger of the Year.
Which is astounding given the absolute piffle you have just finished reading.
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