Wild Frontier: To boldly go where no Northerner has gone before!

I’ve been a seasonal assistant ecologist at Wild Frontier Ecology for 9 months and I’d like to think that I’ve come a long way and learnt a lot. From my first day when I arrived fresh faced and excited, through the newt season (when we all became decidedly less fresh faced but no less excited), past fields of phase 1s to finally ending up sat at a desk wearing a bobble hat and inputting bird data it’s been a wonderful adventure of ups, downs and occasional horizontals (most notably when I slipped on a sugar beet and ended up lying on my side looking up at a rather amused colleague).
I started in April, the lone seasonal (for a whole week), and was soon up to my armpits (literally) in bright pink disinfectant. I loved the great crested newt season, even with the late nights. It’s incredibly exciting pointing a torch bigger than your own head at a pond and not only spotting a GCN but suddenly realising you’ve managed to learn to tell whether it’s a male or female. However, the down is just around the corner and comes in the form of over 200 used bottle traps that need be disinfected before they can go near another pond… and that’s what seasonal assistants are for. By the end of the newt season not only was I good at newt surveys I had become incredibly efficient at bottle washing, cane wiping and boot cleaning. At least we had playing tennis at lunchtime on the courts outside the office and laughing at each other falling in ponds to keep us sane.
After newts came the reptiles and phase 1 surveys, hours of walking around fields looking at your own feet, because let’s face it, most of the plants are on the floor and you don’t find many grass snakes up trees. It’s a steep learning curve of plant names, tree species, habitat types and reptile spotting but it beats the gym for getting you in to shape and you get a lovely tan (even if it is just on the back of your neck and that awkward spot where your t-shirt rides up). The rest of the team all know their stuff and are so willing to share their knowledge that by the end of the surveys I’d learnt to handle adders, catch slow worms (they’re only slow in name, believe me) and name most common trees (somehow I didn’t learn this skill on my marine biology degree).
By July we were well and truly into the bat surveys, which is different again (not least because you get to look up for a change) and presents a whole new set of adventures. Such as walking around fields in the dark, strapped to a bat detector and wishing you’d worn wellies. Or finding yourself sat in a ditch under a hedge hoping the herd of bullocks will get bored of you. A week later (and after some encouraging words from colleagues) I bravely walked back across the same field, gave the bullocks a stern talking to (along the lines of “I’m not scared of you, so there!”) and conquered my fear of cows! I also learnt to analyse bat data and recognise a variety of calls.
With October came rain and we had to change from outdoor tennis to ping-pong in the meeting room and I found myself sat over a microscope identifying aquatic invertebrates, a job which I thoroughly enjoyed as I have a particular interest in this group and love any excuse to learn more about them. Although, by the end of the samples I did see aquatic inverts every time I closed my eyes, but that may have just been the fumes from the preservative.
November arrived, the other seasonal assistants were long gone and the weather turned cold. I knitted a new hat and we all began the slow descent into the winter ecologist. All the data input and analysis, report writing, equipment cleaning and ping-pong playing that got neglected during the hectic field season needed doing. It was very different to the field work but analysing the data collected through the year and writing the reports was interesting in its own way and led to a deeper understanding of what we’d all achieved through the year by standing in fields and falling in ponds.
But now December is here and with it the end of my contract, with only the Christmas party to look forward to before I leave. So, how would I sum up the last 9 months? I think the best way would be to say that it’s a rollercoaster of late nights, cute critters, wet feet and tired eyes… but bring on March because I can’t wait to do it all again!

– Claire