A Cautionary Tale

If you are contemplating a career as an bio-cowboy (more commonly referred to as "field technician"), I have three pieces of advice that you should consider in advance:

(1) If you want to make money while being a bio-cowboy, you must also have one or several more lucrative night-jobs, such as bank-robbing, rich-widow-seducing, loan-sharking, kidnapping or black-mailing. If none of those are up your alley, you can still earn more money per hour flipping burgers than you can working in the field.

(2) Be prepared to deal with disappointment and despair; the majority of the projects you work on will be marginally successful at best. Also, you'll usually have a front-row seat to the mindless anthropogenic destruction of the natural world, the infuriating inadequacy of the institutions that are supposed to protect the environment, and people's point-blank refusal to accept scientific findings. Oh, and don't expect to get laid.* It's hard to convince someone to come home with you after admitting that you run around the forest with an antennae for a living (or that you dissect poop to identify seed content, or that you count dead birds under wind turbines, or that you time how long it takes different insects to find a corpse…the list goes on and on…).

(3) Last, and more importantly, get ready to be humbled. You will see many wondrous, beautiful things that you would never witness in another line of work. You'll be among the few that catch a glimpse of what the world as it was before we arrived, and what it will be when we are finished, in all of its violent, intricate glory. You will meet and work alongside brilliant people who have passed up much more profitable jobs in order to study something worth investigating, uncover something worth discovering, salvage something worth saving. You will toil under the sun, in the rain, amidst swarms of mosquitoes, in stinking wetlands, and at the end of the day, you'll look back and realize that you worked for something that is beyond monetary value, something so vast it is defined in terms of a thousand different units interacting on hundreds of different actuarial tables–and we still have so much left to discover.

Oh, I suppose there's one more piece of advice you should consider: don't expect nature to cooperate. For example, we're trying to teach the Jays to go into cages for peanuts so we can collect parasite data on them. They don't always seem to be okay with this plan.

*This is not entirely true–most bio-cowgirls I know with get a fair number of offers when they go out on the town. However, as the bars ecologists frequent are usually in the middle of goddam nowhere, the propositions leave something to be desired. By and large, it's hard to for field biologists to sleep with someone who doesn't believe in evolution. Creationism is such a turn-off.