Careers in Ecology: Field Biologist
Field biologists spend most of their time off the beaten path, collecting data in remote locations and harsh conditions. Though that may not sound enticing to everyone, it’s an exciting and rewarding career for those who choose it. The nomadic life and spartan living can be hard, but the chance to study natural places and contribute to conservation initiatives is an amazing opportunity to “work”.
During the tortoise season this spring, a reporter hiked and camped with us for a night to get a taste of what we do, and why we do it. Read on to get a taste of life as a field biologist:
The searchers Story by Joseph Langdon
Low pay. No benefits. Long days in the lonesome desert. Why do field biologists do it? A thirst for adventure — and a sense of purpose
I mistake them at first for street kids bumming on the sidewalk outside the Rosewood Apartments, a well-worn complex over in Winchester. Then I notice their bags are a bit too full, too well-packed; their sun-battered skin and dusty boots have an aura of purpose. These are the people I’ve come to meet, a team of field biologists about to head deep into the Mojave to monitor the rare and threatened desert tortoise.
Kirsten Dutcher, the crew’s leader, pulls up in a massive truck emblazoned with their hand-painted insignia — “Knight Viper” — and stamped with carapaces, like kills on a cockpit, to commemorate each tort they’ve spotted.
“You’re lucky,” Dutcher tells me. “Most days we start out at three or four in the morning.”
The waiting crew members fling their heavy packs into the truck, scan maps, and assess water and provisions. These are the foot soldiers in the struggle to defend the environment. Field biologists do the dirty work that provides much of the raw data that guide preservation and recovery plans around the planet and help shape local, national and international law.
They’re also the bohemians of the science world. Their jobs are generally low-paying, itinerant and rarely last longer than a couple of months, so they routinely camp out on each other’s floors and crowd into cheap apartments. Like members of a band, they travel the country in run-down vans, heading to whatever gig they can find.
When Dutcher was getting her master’s degree in ecology, one of her advisors warned her that field research is “the bottom of the barrel of biology.”
“It’s the most physically demanding,” Dutcher explains, “definitely takes the most of your time, still requires the same amount of education (as laboratory work), the same amount of hard science background, but often you’re paid less than minimum wage. You rarely have health care, don’t have benefits, and the jobs don’t last.”
I’m about to follow her into the untrammeled desert to find out why she’s been doing it for a decade — and has no intention of quitting any time soon.
And then we walk
Their crew of six heads north on Highway 93 into Coyote Springs as fighters from Nellis zip overhead. We follow a gravel road until it becomes a dirt road, and keep going until that trickles down to two ruts in the earth that eventually dissolve to nowhere in particular. Then we walk.
The team must hike in and establish a base camp five kilometers away, just on the far side of a saddle in the Desert Range that rises nearly a kilometer high. We each have to hump in about 30 pounds of water, plus food and supplies.
At this point I might as well note that I’m not really a backpacker — in that I’ve never done it before. Most of my gear is borrowed. My boots have their shoe-store sheen. My hat is a fedora. None of my clothing bears the imprimatur of an outdoorsy European brand — just brown cotton slacks and an old army jacket. No fibers naturally “wick.”
As I clamber up the rocks, I struggle to cope with having a third of my body weight swinging on my back and attempt to tune out a discussion of rattlesnakes — specifically, what a great habitat this is for rattlesnakes.
At the crest, we’re rewarded with a view of limitless ranges and valleys all around. The only trace of humanity is the highway, reduced to an indecipherable ribbon of white far below. We stop for just a minute or two to suck on the thin air. Then we descend. On the way down, I notice that my comrades do not employ the arm-flailing balancing technique that I tend to favor.
Here, tortoise tortoise tortoise
In 1994, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that the threatened Mojave population of the desert tortoise must be monitored for at least a generation; for a species that can live to be octogenarians, that means at least 25 years of close observation. Dutcher and her crew, who work for Reno-based Great Basin Institute, are among more than 50 biologists from three organizations surveying 46,000 square kilometers of critical habitat that also includes areas of Utah, Arizona and California.
Instead of hunting for tortoises, the researchers use a method called line-distance sampling, which requires hiking in pairs and scouting for torts along square, 12-kilometer transects. These randomly generated routes provide researchers with an unbiased sample over a large area. The downside is that for the stats to work, the teams must follow the transects precisely — and the computers give no allowance to terrain. The routes cut at all angles across mountains and cliffs, and through gullies, canyons and washes.
Teams have the option of cutting really brutal transects in half, but they seem to prefer gutting it out. Simeon Caskey and Daniel Leach pride themselves on conquering a transect that marched straight across a series of six deep washes.
“They weren’t even washes, they were canyons,” Leach, 26, says, recalling the steep, 50-meter faces he traversed despite a blister on his heel the size of a silver dollar (though it “wasn’t as bad as it looks”). The really tough part about walking transects, he says, is that after you make it up that last cliff, “you turn the corner, then you have to go back through everything you just did again.”
“Honestly, I really enjoyed it,” says his partner, Caskey, 25. “We were in some mountains that probably very few humans have ever been in. This one peak was more or less inaccessible unless you wanted to climb some cliffs. It was pretty neat to think that you might be the only people who have ever been there.”
“And we did destroy last year’s time,” Leach adds.
This gig is tough, but it beats other jobs he’s had, like crunching data in a lab or “watching plants grow.” As a proudly proclaimed “dirtbag biologist,” Leach hasn’t worked a job longer than seven months since he graduated college. Unemployment is frequent, and competition is stiff.
“You have to apply to 50, 60, 70 jobs, because you’re going to get a call back from maybe two,” says James Miller, 25. As a result, instead of having a narrow specialty, field biologists tend to move all around the country, or the globe, working on a wide range of projects.
Dave Ellis, 27, has worked in South Africa, Central America and Peru, and Corrine Michaud, 28, is a lepidopterist with two master’s degrees, but this is their first time in the American West. They were welcomed to February in the desert by thunderstorms, hail, snow and a windstorm in a fire-ravaged transect that blackened them with soot “like firefighters.”
Not that they mind too much. Ellis, who grew up in a tough-luck Philadelphia suburb, got to fulfill his boyhood dream of spotting a Gila monster in the wild.
“I’ll never forget the look on his face,” Dutcher recalls. “He smiled from here to here and here to here,” she says, touching her chin, nose and ears. (They beg Ellis to flash his Gila-smile again, but he just reddens a little over a tight grin. “Can’t be replicated,” he says.)
