Conscious Choice: Fieldwork Anyone Can Do

May 2000

Fieldwork Anyone Can Do

by Ana Arias Terry

Is it possible for someone who struggled with introductory-level biology in college to step into a world of field research activities? If so, would he or she feel compelled to walk on tiptoe?

Disheartened nonscientist volunteers of the world, take heart. Millions of Ph.D.-impaired volunteers are making meaningful contributions around the globe. And they’re doing it while on "vacation." These working vacations aren’t restricted to wealthy dilettantes. While some working volunteer vacations are pricier than others, "free" field research opportunities abound in our own backyards as well.

The scientist/researcher and nonscientist relationship seems to create a symbiotic existence: field leaders benefit from extra and willing hands, ears, eyes, and noses to help with hundreds of tasks that must be conducted with great accuracy and regularity. The nonscientist volunteers get to participate in fantastic outdoor adventures about which they otherwise only could have dreamed.

The Possibilities

The range and scope of activities that can become part of a nonscientist volunteer’s experience are huge. They go by many names: adventure research trips, fieldwork, working vacations, service outings. They come in many ranges of time commitment, cost scales, and task variation. And they can be found locally and abroad.

Organizations that host such opportunities include the Audubon Society, Earthwatch, the Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife Federation, Elder Hostel, National Park Service, the Department of Parks and Recreation, Division of Wildlife, Forest Service, Sierra Club, Volunteer America, U.S. Geological Survey, universities, museums, and many more.

The options are as diverse as people’s interests. Right at home, many organizations offer myriad opportunities. People with good communication skills and a leaning toward environmental education can work as naturalists at preserves. In this capacity volunteers can monitor anything from the plant community to bat and raptor habitats. Those with greener thumbs may prefer to get involved in native plant maintenance or conservation by assisting with revegetation and weed management. Opportunities also exist where volunteers are trained to conduct water-quality assessments of streams. Other organizations can provide animal rehabilitation and research experiences.

Views from Nonscientists

If you still think that every volunteer who steps up to the field research plate is just a well-disguised scientist, think again. Let’s take a look at the volunteer experiences of two nonscientists who have been making meaningful contributions — both on native soil and internationally.

Susan Craig is a customer service representative in sales for the American Birding Association in the Colorado Springs, Colorado, region. Craig has been volunteering with the U.S. Geological Survey — National Biological Survey — Bird Banding Laboratory for years.

"Bird banding involves catching and banding birds in order to monitor they migration patterns and survivability," says Craig. She has had a master permit to band birds since 1976, and she has done this kind of volunteer work in upstate New York, Massachusetts, and Florida. She has had hands-on experience with hawks, small migratory songbirds, peregrine falcons, black-headed Grosbeaks, and Loggerhead Shrikes. She typically bands approximately 500 birds a year.

"One of the best captures I ever had," she adds, "was a peregrine falcon wearing a Danish band, captured in Florida in November 1987. She had been banded as a nestling in Greenland the preceding July and by a bander who now lives here in Colorado," she says.

Her most recent work has her involved handling Loggerhead Shrikes. The data she has collected have offered solid information about the survivorship of young birds that spans from their nestling stage through their very first migration south. Craig says that not many people want to work with shrikes because the birds are nasty biters; however, she claims that the data she has compiled reveals new information not yet found in the published literature.

Despite all the years she has devoted to this type of volunteer effort, she says "Each bird is like a mystery novel; I can read signals in eye color to tell me about age, or feathers to tell me about how well the bird was fed by its parents. I can tell whether it’s ready to migrate or ready to lay eggs, whether it’s male or female. But there’s always something new. I guess the birds continue my training."

If you think you might like to try this type of volunteer field research work, Craig offers a few pointers. Be patient, take notes, be as consistent with your data gathering as possible, don’t give up, and don’t pack all your notes and data in a shoe box to gather dust under your bed.

Does Craig recommend this activity highly? You bet. "Putting a band on a bird is like putting a note in a bottle and throwing that bottle into the ocean. The bird may reappear in your own nets years later, or perhaps thousands of miles away. To put up a mist nest and see birds from the sky...to throw a trap to pull a hawk off a telephone pole...to pluck a snarling owl from a net while trying to avoid being bitten or footed...to watch a shrike zero in on the mouse in your trap...to make rounds of your nets and find that rare bird like a jewel, just waiting for your careful fingers to remove it from the net. While some of these things may seem insignificant, maybe with the shrikes I’ve uncovered some new facet of their lives that will help prolong their existence on this planet. That’s my hope."

The kind of passion and enthusiasm Craig displays is also clearly visible in Mary Feay, a retired Lucent Technologies employee from Naperville, Illinois. Feay readily admits that she’s addicted to Earthwatch. She’s also the field representative for the Chicago area.

Ready to read and marvel? Mary and husband Bruce Feays’ first Earthwatch trip took them to Borneo in 1985. They have worked with primates, following lemur troops in Madagascar, detailing their location on a grid. They marked trees the lemurs ate from for more than ten minutes. This allowed botanists to identify key food sources for lemurs so as to preserve and plant those resources. The Feays’ adventures have also taken them to Sri Lanka, where they’ve worked with toque macaques, to Costa Rica and Venezuela, where they helped with capuchins, and to Argentina for field activities with black howlers.

Feay has worked on small mammal trapping (harmless) to weigh and mark the animals to record biodiversity and species data, as well as worked on taking animal census. Their most recent field research outing last December took them to Melbourne, Australia, where they helped on a study of forest marsupials. They worked primarily with Leadbeaters (the most endangered mammal in Australia) and mountain brushtail possums, but they also got to handle antechinus (small marsupial mice) as well as native rats.

Dr. David Lindenmayer, the principal investigator in this journey, and Chris MacGregor, research officer, are attempting to develop ways to save the possum. Concurrently, they are trying to figure ways in which logging in the temperate rainforest can be achieved more sustainably. He has led more than 2,000 volunteers to do proper "stagwatching." This is the art of nightly observation to identify the tree-based nocturnal marsupials based on their silhouettes.

To prospective nonscientist volunteers, Feay has these words of advice. "Earthwatch projects are selected to be ones that nonscientists can easily be trained to do and contribute to. There’s usually a need for more eyes and hands than just the scientists’. Some projects wouldn’t even be considered without the volunteer help. Look at all the possibilities, and if the activity sounds like fun, then it is the one you should volunteer for, and you will be able to learn what needs to be done. These are working vacations, but the work is enjoyable, rewarding, educational, and sometimes creative and invigorating."

The Researcher Perspective

So what do the scientists/field researchers really think of nonscientists’ contributions to their research projects? If the feedback from three Earthwatch field researchers is any indication, it’s a win-win scenario.

Dr. Frank Paladino, professor and chairman of the biology department at Indiana-Purdue University in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and his colleagues Dr. James Spotila (Drexel University, Pennsylvania) and postdoctoral research associate Dr. Richard Reina (also of Drexel), lead the scientific research via an Earthwatch expedition that studies leatherback turtles in Costa Rica. Dr. Paladino insists that the success of these programs is dependent upon a team effort that involves the scientists, the sponsoring organizations, and, of course, the volunteers.

Dr. Paladino began leading layperson teams in field research work in 1988. He began in Costa Rica’s Tortugero, with the Caribbean Conversation Corporation and Dr. Archie Carr. He has been involved with Earthwatch since 1991.

Leatherbacks can tip the scales at 400 kilograms and plunge into ocean depths of 1,400 meters. Worldwide populations have declined by more than two-thirds over the past two decades. This leaves approximately 35,000 females believed to be in existence now (only females are commonly counted in the census). Three beaches in Costa Rica represent the fourth most important nesting area worldwide; yet nesting populations there have plummeted by 85 percent in the past eleven years. The causes? Serious history of egg harvesting and deaths of adults due to gill nets, shrimp nets, and long lines.

According to Dr. Paladino, the efforts of the nonscientist volunteers have contributed significantly to the long-range collection of "baseline data on population biology." He notes that data collection is only possible through consistent and careful nocturnal surveys of nesting beaches performed by committed researchers and volunteers. These duties, Dr. Paladino explains, include accurately identifying and counting the number of nesting female leatherbacks, identifying where the eggs are laid on the beach and the number of eggs laid per female per nest, the success rate of the particular clutch of eggs, and exploring the long-term effects of El Niño on the female nesting population.

"This data is tedious to collect year after year and requires lots of long hours patrolling the beach at night. Without volunteers, much of this very valuable information would never get collected," says Dr. Paladino. "Is this important as science? You bet. And as proof I submit to you that some of this data will be published in a month or so in the leading journal Nature. Not bad for volunteer work!" Actually, a total of three papers have been published in Nature, thanks to this project.

Dr. Paladino advises nonscientists considering volunteer fieldwork to be receptive to learning and participating. While volunteers wouldn’t be qualified to place satellite transmitters on turtles or take blood samples for hormone or genetic analysis, he says, such duties as putting the samples on ice and transferring them to the lab are very helpful. He particularly appreciates volunteers who share an awareness and a concern for leatherbacks in relation to the pressure humans impose on natural ecosystems.

"This long-term study has provided the data to help convince the Costa Rican government to create a new national Park, Parque Marino Las Baulas [leatherbacks], which is protecting these endangered turtles, their nests, and the beach," Dr. Paladino says proudly. Completing the picture is the fact that the current director of this new park, Rotney Pietra, completed his MS thesis research on leatherbacks under Paladino’s direction and that of his colleagues.

"This work has provided an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of this rare and little studied animal that has been in existence for over twenty million years in about the same body form," explains Dr. Paladino. "Without the volunteers, their time, their effort, and their enthusiasm, this would not have been possible."

Dr. Roger Powell, a zoologist and associate professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, along with colleagues Dr. Michael Mitchell, a wildlife ecologist at Auburn University, and Dr. Theodore Simons, an ornithologist at North Carolina State University, lead an Earthwatch expedition that studies Blue Ridge bears. Except a two-year volunteer hiatus, Dr. Powell and his colleagues have led more than 300 volunteers and studied more than 120 bears since 1984.

Ever wondered about the strength of one of these animals? Underneath its soft fur, the bear is as hard as nails, and some volunteers get to find out what bear muscle feels like (while the bear is tranquilized, of course). They also help the researchers capture and radio-track black bear to ascertain if keeping track of specific "indicator species" populations, such as black bears, can provide clues on changes of habitat that impact plant ecology and other animal species.

Dr. Powell and his colleagues lead volunteers into the woods at the Pisgah Black Bear Sanctuary, along the Blue Ridge Parkway, where they test the validity of a specific, and critical, conservation theory: that hunting pressure by humans, and not habitat, is what controls the bear population here.

The good doctors need help to trap, count, and radio-track the black bears as they’ve been doing for nearly two decades. But they also conduct salamander monitoring at night and bird monitoring in the mornings in what they assess as "good" or "bad" black bear habitats. They also have to monitor variations in two of the bear’s key foods: berries and squawroot.

This great adventure is not for those who are shy about physical activity. "We need labor on our project, and we really do put Earthwatch volunteers to work," says Dr. Powell. "Volunteers check live-traps every day in May through early July. They help us index the bear population using a bait station index, sample the production of important foods, follow the bears using radio telemetry — and they give us good ideas that we would not otherwise consider. Without the volunteers, we simply could not have so many jobs going on during the same time period."

How much adventure are we really talking? According to Dr. Powell, the live-trapping lines can vary significantly in length — from a mile to about ten. The lines have to be checked every morning within a two to two-and-a-half hour time slot. These lines span along mountain trails, which requires some bushwhacking. "In the afternoons, we hike to places that are merely dots on a map to learn what the habitats are like there and sometimes to sample foods that grow there for bears. These bushwhacking expeditions can go miles up and down mountains," Dr. Powell explains. With a radio telemetry schedule that consists of eight hours on and twenty-four hours off, it means that they often conduct telemetry in the middle of the night, with volunteers entering information onto a laptop.

Dr. Powell likes the perspectives brought on by the likes of volunteers who have ranged in the professional gamut from lawyers, doctors, and firefighters, to housewives and art teachers. "Last year, a mechanical engineer revamped our live-traps, making them much less prone to human error caused by inexperienced volunteers," says Dr. Powell. "Because of his background, this particular volunteer knew of resources we did not and could solve problems — some of which we didn’t even consider problems till he pointed them out."

While Dr. Powell can’t actively solicit funds that would put him in a competitive situation with Earthwatch, some volunteers have chosen to make their own donations. In times of funding shortages, some of the private contributions have allowed the project to keep going.

The only disadvantage involved in working with volunteers at all, says Dr. Powell, is the stress of coordinating and anticipating difficulties. Despite this, the benefits seem to far outweigh this inconvenience. Dr. Powell encourages prospective volunteers not to hesitate to jump in. He appreciates the volunteers’ willingness to work hard and their eagerness to become educated about the research. He advises volunteers to think out loud and ask questions, including queries on protocol (though he notes the importance of being polite).

Dr. Powell says that nonscientist volunteers who are most useful to the fieldwork are those who are in good spirits, have an interest in science, and enjoy the great outdoors. "We can and have accommodated people with widely varying physical abilities," he says, "as long as they are enthusiastic and want to work hard."

Taking the Plunge

If we tally up the results, based on the feedback from nonscientist volunteers and the researchers who lead the explorations, it’s easy to see that it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. And let’s not forget the benefits to the species being studied!

The contributions you can make are real, significant, and available now. There’s no need to feel inadequate or foolish. With training and patient guidance from field researchers and their colleagues, the experience will be both memorable and rewarding.

Resources

American Birding Association, 800-850-2473

Earthwatch, 978-461-0081

The Nature Conservancy

National Wildlife Federation

Elder Hostel

U.S. Geological Survey

Sierra Club

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