When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And when fieldwork throws up problems, write a blog post about it.
I’m a big fan of people that talk about failures. It’s probably a British thing. Truth is, fieldwork has so many moving parts, so many things that can go slightly awry—or even life-threateningly wrong—that I sometimes think it’s a miracle we manage to collect any data at all.
For sure, there are awesome moments. But as prepared as you might feel for any eventuality, something will inevitably end up going wrong. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that most of my field seasons so far have been characterised by something going either slightly–or otherwise catastrophically–amiss.
Then comes what is probably the most important question in all of science. So, what the bloody hell are we supposed to do now?
Here’s a short list of some of the many things that have gone astray whilst I’ve been in the field. (I got a bit bored and so decided to give each scenario a fairy-tale like title, but ran out of creative ideas pretty fast–so apologies that the first one sounds more like that menacing bible story).
The Flood
Thrown in at the deep end—quite literally—during my first field season in Borneo, I was aiming to sample dung beetles along a gradient of restored logged forests of different ages. This plan was quickly put to bed a few weeks into starting, after a huge flood blocked access to all the younger forest sites. That left me wondering just what the hell I was going to do my Master’s project on.
Solution: Noah didn’t build me an arc so I had to change my whole blinking question, didn’t I.
2. The Rat and the Pong
Turns out my new Master’s question was pretty quick to complete, so I decided to try my hand at another project. I wanted to look at the functional diversity of dung beetles—the ability of communities to carry out important roles in the forest, like dung removal. In practice, this involved me putting different mixtures of dung beetle species in sand-filled boxes and seeing how quickly the mock beetle communities could bury a 100-gram turd. Who said science has to be high-tech, ey?
Flash-forward past a tenacious rat that kept breaking into the boxes (and leaving 100 grams the heavier), a sequence of tourists at the research centre complaining about the smell, and several hours a day of spooning crap onto a set of weighing scales in an unventilated, sweltering cupboard and it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t the project for me.
Solution: I came up with a completely new experiment exploring how dung beetle immunity differs between logged and old-growth forest. Which—in my biased opinion—is much more interesting. And anyway, it’s objectively less smelly.
3. Slicing Through The Vines (kind of like a prince or something)
Back in Borneo the following year, the plan this time was to machete 25 kilometres of rainforest trails so that we could set up a large-scale forest restoration experiment. Enter two months of umming and ahhing incited by the election of the first new Malaysian government in sixty years. Throw a series of collapsed bridges, overgrown roads and broken machetes into the mix for good measure. And suddenly, it seemed this mammoth task might prove a struggle.
Solution: Turbo-macheting. We worked double-time and got everything sorted on schedule.
4. Google and the Cloud Forest Cult
This time in the Colombian Andes, we turned up to beautiful El Taladro psyched to sample in some remote cloud forest. Everything looked fine and dandy when previewed a few days earlier on Google maps. Unfortunately, it turns out that Google maps, as good as it might be for viewing landscape configurations, has yet to incorporate a feature charting the presence of cloud forest cults. With our projected sites falling slap bang in the centre of lands owned the by largest congregation of Taoist monks in Latin America—who have been busily purchasing up forest in preparation for a prophesied holy war—we had to have a rethink.
Solution: We changed the location of our field sites to fall outside Taoist territory. In what is without a doubt one of the strangest experiences of my life, we carried out fieldwork in 2850-metre-high forest at 3 am in the morning to the haunting tune of Taoist chants blaring out of nearby megaphones.
The best advice for dealing with problems in the field
So, things go wrong and that’s okay. Like all good advice, this following piece comes from the natural world.
(Stick at it).
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