Greetings from the scrub

For the past six months I’ve been working as an avian ecology intern at a vibrant, wonderful biological station in (not so vibrant, wonderful) south-central Florida. In exactly one week I’ll be packing up all my stuff and driving a thousand miles home to prepare for a conference and, following that, the move to Durham. This timeline has been set since I accepted the position; the strange thing is that I now find myself thinking in circles whenever I consider the amount of time I’ve been here. On one hand, the tasks I was charged with completing in March and April and May seem like ancient history. Moreover, the level of familiarity I’ve achieved with the study site and 250+ Florida Scrub-Jays within it is a testament to the months I’ve spent in the field. On the other hand: Um, didn’t I just get here? Where did March and April and May go? It takes flipping through my journal and perusing several files of photos to convince myself that I was, in fact, alive and conscious for the past half year – not only that, but working 10 hours a day to track this population of bold, spunky birds during the entirety of their breeding season. Yet I truly struggle to accept the length of time I’ve been here.

I think a principal reason for that struggle – which is a shared sentiment, judging from the “Can you believe how fast it’s been?” exchanges with other interns – lies in the repetitiveness inherent in data collection and processing. It’s a singular mentality manifesting itself during each field job I’ve held; individual days are rendered meaningless as we conduct the same activities hour after hour to compile a massive amount of data. Then all of a sudden, a month or two or five are gone, and the sole proof of their passage is in the arbitrary list of dates written in our field books and official files.

For the majority of the season, my days revolved entirely around deciphering scrub-jay behavior to find and monitor nests, punctuated by population censuses and trapping of unbanded birds. Life was defined by nest searches, nest checks, chick ages and the absence of weekends (jays don’t have them, so why should we?). When nesting activity wound down in late May, we switched gears to working on our required independent projects, whereupon I conducted the same experiments for one month straight before embarking on number-crunching and writing. Up next week are furious draft revisions and Powerpoint creations, the final presentation on Thursday, and departure on Friday. And…scene. That’s it?

I’ve been dwelling on the time issue lately, because witnessing the speed with which my internship flew by makes me apprehensive that my 20s will be summed up in a box of field books and spreadsheets. (I blame this illustration for the “aaagh!” moment.) But even as I write this post, I know on some level my worries are unfounded, since anyone reading this blog probably doesn’t take his/her education too passively. The best assurance I have is my fortune to be specializing in one of the topics I most enjoy and to be doing so among the brightest academic community I could ask for. That, and when “work” is loosely defined as “testing behavioral hypotheses by playing games with birds (plus stopping to look at cool things along the way),” all those hours in the field are worth it. Go figure, I can actually earn a degree doing this!

–Irene L.

A male Florida Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens) perching on my ATV and being ridiculously tame.

Nineteen days old and ready to jump ship…