Cows, Creosotes, and Checkerboards

This week we welcome Dr. Kaiya Provost to the blog. Kaiya is a Postdoc at the Ohio State University working with Bryan Carstens on bioacoustics and phylogeography of North American birds. For more about Kaiya, see the end of this post or find her on Twitter @KaiyaProvost.

Big Bend National Park, Texas, 2016, is where my hatred of cows began. That summer, one charged me when I rounded a corner and got too close. I thought for sure I was going to get gored or trampled, but I didn’t. For some reason, I decided to continue being an ornithologist who works on southwestern ranch land. What can I say? Ranch land birds are great. 

Ranchers’ cows, which are common to the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts and are the nemeses of the author. Credit to B.T. Smith

By 2018, I was in the Big Hatchet Mountains, New Mexico. Hard to get to. Extremely dry. You can see creosote bushes for miles, dry canyons that capture what little rainwater there is, and no people.

My advisor, Brian, and I were out in the field before heading to a conference in Tucson. I’d spent my morning looking for Canyon Towhees. I’d been trying to lure them in with a recording of their song, holding a handheld bluetooth speaker over my head. I’d seen zero. 

It was a 3 km hike uphill to get into that particular canyon, and I could make out our truck only as a black pinprick among creosotes. Lunch was in that truck, and breakfast had been only half of a Clif bar. 

As both humans and birds agree that midday in the desert is unpleasant, I started hiking back to the truck. Brian was around somewhere. In the canyons I didn’t have cell service, so I couldn’t text him until I got up on a hill. 

A typical field work lunch or dinner for the author. Tortillas with canned refried beans and pickled jalapenos. Not pictured: diluted Gatorade and apples. Credit to B.T. Smith

As I rounded a corner, I froze. 10 feet in front of me was something big. Much bigger than me. It was a cow, I realized. And it stared at me with big black eyes. 

I bolted through the mesquite, thorns everywhere; I scrambled down that hill, my hands grabbing at creosote bushes to keep me from slipping. I slipped anyway, landing on my hands, shredding my palms. I heard my bluetooth speaker chime off and power down, but dismissed it, running as fast as I could until I realized the cow had not charged me. No, as I turned around, the cow was placidly munching on a bush.

Heart pounding, I glared at the cow and its dopey black eyes, hoping that it could sense my anger and not my panic. For ten minutes I cussed out the cow, field work, Canyon Towhees, and Clif bars. After that I ran out of steam and limped to the truck in the desert heat.

After another half hour, I reached for my phone to text Brian. Shoot. Where was it? I must have misplaced it.

There was a mesh pocket on the side of my bag, one I’d been keeping my phone in. The problem? The bottom of the pocket was gone and the mesh was full of mesquite thorns.

Icy dread clogged my throat. I dumped my bag on the passenger seat. Half a Clif bar. Water bottle. Pencil. Paper. Field notebook. Bluetooth speaker. Another pencil. No phone. Which meant no directions, no playback, no field work. I went through the pile again. I turned the bag inside out. 

Brian came back as I went through the pile again. 

“What’s up?” he asked. 

I looked under the seat. I went through the pile a fourth time. “I lost my phone,” I said.

“Yikes,” he said. 

I stared up at that hillside, at the mountain. It loomed over me, like it spanned forever. I wondered, I was out for six hours. Where could my phone have fallen? I could see it in my mind’s eye, the blue case knocked off, battery slowly discharging.

I thought I was a failed scientist. 

As I started putting my bag together, I saw the bluetooth speaker. Oddly, it was still on. Hadn’t I heard it turn off before, while I was scrambling through that mesquite bush?

Wait. It was a bluetooth speaker. Connected to my phone, with a range of 30 feet. And it chimed anytime it lost or gained the connection. I could use the speaker to find my phone! Like a metal detector, with a 30 foot sensor on the end! 

Determined, hopeful, I walked back up into the Big Hatchet Mountains. Uphill. At high noon.

The hike felt like it took hours. To add insult to injury, I could see the offending cow as a speck in the distance. There were more mesquites than I remembered up there. They all looked the same. Was that the one I fell through? I can’t give up, I told myself. I’m gonna find that phone or pass out from dehydration. 

I picked a bush, took out the speaker, and started moving in circles. One loop around. Two loops. Three. I’m never going to find it, I thought. I’m a bad scientist, I couldn’t even find a Towhee, this was a mistake —

The speaker chimed. 

I could have cried from sheer relief. Somewhere close to me was my phone. I wasn’t a failure. 

Of course, as I moved forward, the speaker disconnected. Turns out, a 30 foot radius is a lot of ground to cover when looking for something that small, even if it’s in a bright blue case. I walked one way, the speaker turned on. Another, it turned off. I made a checkerboard across the hillside, the day well past noon and the sun relentless, but not as relentless as me. 

Forever later, finally, I saw it under a mesquite. A rectangle with a bright blue case on it and a bird sticker on the back. My cell phone, which could have been a bar of solid gold at that moment. 

I grabbed it and dropped to the ground. The screen was newly cracked, but I could still see everything and swipe through. I even had service! A text from Brian popped up, asking if I was still alive. 

I did it! 

As I went back down the hill, that cow still stared at me. When I made it to the truck, my lunch was the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Diluted Gatorade and cold refried beans; a victory feast. 

I didn’t tell Brian about the cow until after we got to Tucson. 

A view from the base of the Big Hatchet Mountains. Credit to the author

Kaiya Provost is an ornithologist, evolutionary biologist, and self-declared cow nemesis. She is a postdoc at the Ohio State University working with Bryan Carstens on bioacoustics and phylogeography of North American birds. She got her PhD with Brian Tilston Smith at the American Museum of Natural History’s Richard Gilder Graduate School working on desert bird genomics and demographics. 

Freshwater Exploration: are Invasive Crayfish Predating Benthic Invertebrates

This week Dispatches from the field welcomes Arron Watson,  who conducted his masters by research in Entomology at the University of Reading. His summer project was to investigate how signal crayfish, an invasive species, has an impact on benthic invertebrate predation. He sampled 20 sites across the UK, 10 without signal crayfish, 10 with. He conducted this field work over a month in May and is telling us about his experiences here!

May 1^st 2018: the first day of field work for my summer thesis, a key part of my MRes in entomology at the University of Reading. I had already spent roughly six months planning my field work, and decided that I wanted to start my freshwater exploration in Scotland. My supervisor from Buglife, Scotland is based in Stirling and he had offered to show me some advanced insect identification techniques. Next, I would drive over 1000 miles around the rest of the U.K. in my 1997 Nissan Micra (aka “the beast”), stopping over in a mix of locations including a hotel and the houses of friends I had met in my previous life as a back packer.

“The beast”

I left Reading at 6 am and headed north up the backbone of the country towards Scotland. I have lived in Reading for about 3 and half years now, so I have gotten used to the urban way of life. In Reading, I see buses much more often than I do trees or sheep. But driving along on a beautiful day with a wad of CDs was fantastic, and the closer I got to Scotland, the greener the landscape appeared and the more free I felt.

I met Craig (my supervisor) in Stirling. He suggested getting some rest after my 7 hour drive, then setting out first thing tomorrow for a set of four rivers to start my sampling. If you’ve never had the chance to “kick sample” before, it’s a lot of fun. It’s one of those things that takes you back to being younger: standing in the middle of a flowing river, dipping your net in, and waiting for living things to end up in there. When you remove the net from the river and you see lots of things wiggling about, you think, excellent!

After collecting the samples, the next step is to sort them. This is where the skill comes in: not only do you have to remove the things you don’t need (such as fish), you also need to identify things based on differences in morphology – without books, depending only on your memory. But Craig also told me just how many different stone flies and mayflies there are, and explained that I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart just by eye, so I should be strict if I thought I collected everything.

Luckily for me, I already had experience identifying terrestrial invertebrates, which was a huge advantage, so after a day’s training, I was a professional picker. Now my task was to collect samples from the rest of my sites, spread across the UK. I would spend the next 3 weeks having limited contact with anyone other than my hosts at each accommodation.

Kick sampling methods used by the environment agency.

My next set of sites were on the Clyde river in Scotland. I was informed to take a letter with me to show any catchment officials or anglers I had permission to be there. I arrived at my first site and started to get a feel of what it was like to be in the middle (not literally) of Scotland. Water running fast, no one in sight, greenery everywhere: bliss! As I got to the edge of the riverbank to look at my first GPS location, I took a minute to stare at the flow of the river and thought, “Oh! Actually that looks like it’s flowing quite fast.” I looked around and realised I really was alone. This is where you start to build field work skills, I realized: no one to rely on, no one to ask, “do you think I will get swept down the stream?” – just your skills and intuition to rely on. After a moment of worry, I told myself, “OK, if I go down that river, I have my buoyancy aid and an inflatable bag which has my phone in it, so I suppose I would be noticed flying down the river like a game of ‘pooh sticks’” (look it up!). I used the pole of my kick sampling net (approximately 1m) to gauge the depth of the river, chose an area where the flow broke slightly, and stepped in. Within a short space of time I had picked my samples, and off I went to Edinburgh to see an old friend. We had a few beers and the following day I headed down to East Yorkshire.

“Alone!, bliss”

I started to feel like things were going really well. My samples were being kept cool in ethanol, the car was running well, and there were no issues so far. It wasn’t until I arrived in Norwich a week later that I would experience my first major problem – which really couldn’t have been controlled or pre-empted.

I had driven to Kings Lynn, heading for a river at the bottom of some farmer’s fields – which was nothing unusual. I found the location and got ready as usual: throwing my waders on, connecting the buoyancy aid connected to my belt, and grabbing my net. As I started to walk down the road, out of nowhere a farmer’s truck drove past me with a carriage of cows. It didn’t faze me at the time: I just headed down the side path, eventually reaching the field with the cows and calves. I walked up to the fence, intending to climb the gate and walk across the field…when all of a sudden, the cows started marching over to me. I had a strange feeling they weren’t there to welcome me.

By the time I got to the fence, a large gang of protective female cows were gazing at me. I tried to spook them, but they wouldn’t budge: they simply grunted at me, looking quite angry. I thought, “No chance am I getting trampled by cows during field work! I will just go around, because there’s another field next door.” I started to walk around to the side, watching the cows follow me out of the corner of my eye. I jumped the fence and started to make my way through some bushes (and brambles), regretting this choice but at the same time pretty sure it was better than cows trampling my head.

But suddenly…squelch! My height dropped by about 2 feet: I had sunk. It turned out that the way I wasn’t meant to go was some sort of swamp or bog…either way, I was stuck. This had happened to me once before, on Cleethorpes mudflats as a young lad. That time, I had gone out in brand new trainers my mum specifically asked me not to ruin. I looked at the cows and thought, “Ha! Cows 2- me 0.”

At this point getting out was my main focus. I knew that when in mud like this, you need to expand your surface area in order not to sink. Unfortunately for me, this meant laying on my front and crawling out. I moved across the marshy land like a seal that had lost its way, until I finally made it out. At times like this, you either have to cry or laugh. I chose to laugh…until I left and realized that the cows were waiting for me like a trained animal retrieving a stick!

“2-0 to the cows”

I will leave you with the image I saw at this point, and I’m sure you can guess what happened next…squelch!

Field work offers rewards and excitement no other work can sometimes……Let’s not forget the cows!

 

Arron is trained in field ecology, and has worked on a number of different research areas such as entomology, freshwater ecology, bat ecology, and the use of drones. He conducted an ecology and wildlife conservation degree at the University of Reading, went on to complete my masters by research in Entomology there also. He is currently working as a research assistant at the University of Reading and founder of a UAV consultancy called EcoDroneUK. 

Clash of the cattle

In my tenure as a field biologist, I’ve experienced and had to deal with many problems…unfortunate events…hideous disasters…whatever you want to call them. Catherine’s blog about the revenge of the ruminants from earlier this month got me thinking about an encounter that I had with these beefy creatures way back at the start of my time doing fieldwork.

Back in my first field season in the summer of 2009, our lab was setting up a long term experiment (about 10 years) to assess the effects of climate change on temperate grassland communities. The first step after getting the overall design and relevant details in order was to find an appropriate field site. We trekked around all over QUBS’ properties, and eventually found a good-sized piece of land on the Bracken tract. It met all of the criteria including having a high species richness, easily accessible by foot and was relatively flat. There had been some cattle grazing allowed on the property but the farmer assured us that they were now back on his property, and for good.

This particular study had 240 replicate 1 x 1 m plots. Treatments included plots with excess water added each week, control plots, and those with rainout shelters to minimize the access of water. There were also nutrient addition plots, and those with herbivore exclosures. Needless to say, it was a huge experiment. We spent a solid week mapping and measuring out the field. We set up the 240 plots and then used 6 different colours of flags to mark them all with their respective treatments. By the end of the week, we had made serious progress. We even left early that Friday just because we had worked so hard.

An example of what the rainout shelters look like. 

We came back Monday ready to start putting up some of the shelters and fences together for the treatments. But the field wasn’t exactly as we had left it. In fact, it wasn’t even close to the condition we left it in. This would have been early June, so the grass was well over a foot tall and there were buttercups ad hawkweeds blooming galore. At least, there were when we had left the field on Friday.

Now the grass was barely an inch tall. The flags were no longer upright. Some were crushed. Some were torn to shreds. Some were just completely gone. And the source of this damage didn’t cover it up well. They certainly left their mark. There were cow patties all over the field site.

This led to a very awkward and upsetting call to our Supervisor about the state of the field, and the wasted hours of work put into setting it up. The next week a bunch of guys came down from Queen’s and installed a barbed wire fence around the site to prevent this from happening again. Luckily, the story has a happy ending because this ended up being an isolated incident and the cows have never broken into the field site after the fence was installed, and the experiment is now going into it’s 6^th year.

The cows make an appearance now and then, and in large numbers, often around 70 at a time. As free-ranging beef cattle they aren’t exactly friendly or unfriendly. If you look them in the eyes, they run the other way. But 5 minutes later you’ll see their heads poking out of the bush wanting another look at what you’re doing. Occasionally one gets stuck in the barbed wire trying to get a taste of the grass in our site. They have at least a hundred acres to roam free on, but of course, the grass is always greener on the other side…or so they say.

They think we can’t see them

Oh, there they are!