On a First Taste of Fieldwork

Rita Matos penned her thoughts (and shared her photos!) on working on the Woodcock Watch as an undergrad -- 

Although I love animals and admire nature all around me, I’ve never been into birds. I was always interested in mammals, but my curiosity for birds lead me to volunteering at the Holzapfel Lab where Kathleen Farley oversees her Woodcock watch. At first I thought to myself, “are we really about to do research with birds? What is there to know anyway but the basic, they fly around and eat a bunch of seeds?” 

Wrong. Once I had received my first task (to listen for woodcock mating calls/displays), I found it to be amusing (because of their calls) and interesting. Once I had a clipboard in hand and started to record data of how many calls I had heard in a night, I became more interested in birds and how habitat structures and human activity could affect their movements, not just that they fly around or waddle.

Once this task was done and the mating season was over, it was on to the next stage: digging for worms to analyze woodcock abundance in an area. Never in my early scientist career did I think I would go and dig for worms in the middle of forests and old abandoned factory sites. However, I was already so deep into the research, I thought “why not?” and accepted the task. 

 

The best part of this task, was the scenery of these places that she had asked me to go to. Some were beautiful lush forests that had little human contact, the crickets, the birds singing, the smell of vegetation and moss all around me was breathtaking for me. Other areas were abandoned sites who had previously been factories, highly polluted areas. These sites intrigued me the most because I saw how nature found a way to recover itself, even after being abused by humanity it found a way to grow a tree, to have shrubs, to have species all around. I felt such tranquility in knowing that humanity didn’t destroy everything after all, that there is a chance where life can start again, someplace, somehow. This experience made digging the worms all worthwhile. 

Today, I’ve come to be more open-minded to any form of nature, whether it be worms, birds, or even fungi. This research has allowed me to discover a new side of myself; an even bigger environmentalist, and a person who respects all of Earth's creatures (not just mammals)!

 

Sadly, despite a few close encounters, neither Kathleen or Rita has yet managed to photograph a woodcock in the wild. But we're hopeful that will change in the 2017 season. If woodcock transmit where they are, then we can turn the tables and sneak up on them!