Fieldwork

I was fortunate in the first lab that I worked for. It was an ecology lab that focused on the impacts of global climate change on California grasslands. The people were wonderful, the work fascinating, and, most importantly to a restless undergraduate, our research required a lot of fieldwork. All of this took place out at Sedgwick Reserve, an ecological preserve owned by the University of California. It looks like this, a lot of the time.

(all of that stuff in the foreground, by the way, is non-native and invasive. Woo European grasses!)

Here, we spent hours upon hours collecting samples, counting plant reproductive structures, and being bitten by everything in existence.

There are a few long term experiments running at Sedgwick, one of which involves grazing (aka, cows). We didn't have any plots in these areas, but we could only imagine the difficulty of those scientists who did.

What we did have were mountain lions. Or, more accurately, mountain lion spoor. Masses of it.

We also found the carcass of a deer once, quite fresh. We didn't get much work done that day; we all got the rather erie feeling of being watched, and were too twitchy to do much good.

In short, the whole experience was an excellent one for a new lab slave. I quickly learned that science was not clean, that involved an enormous quantity of manual labor, and that it frequently bordered on the absurd. In short, that science was bloody fun.