I’m now wrapping up my fifth year as a PhD student at the University of Toronto and am conducting my third summer of co-leading mark-resight field work in collaboration with the Frishkoff lab at the University of Texas, Arlington.
This means this is my third time packing my field clothes into my 60litre blue MEC duffel bag and my third time contemplating if, really, truly, I will wear any shoes that aren’t my Chacos (for driving, grocery shopping) or rubber boots (all field work). Last year, I brought a pair of hiking shoes and never wore them. In fact, a tarantula set up camp in them and I have been afraid to wear them ever since (the tarantula got removed prior to our departure from the Dominican Republic).
Once I have packed all my personal belongings (including rain gear, sleeping bag, tent, thermarest, clothes, insect netting, thermal base layers, multitool, bandanas), the next step is to work with this year’s undergraduate field assistants to pack all the lab gear.
This process can take days…
We need to check whether each of the kit bags contain all the necessary gear (cameras, binocs, temperature gun, headlamp, walkie-talkie, batteries and spare batteries) and that nothing has broken from the previous year. Then we pull out our Team Canada hockey bags (yes, they fit maximum the linear dimensions of a checked bag on major airlines). In each hockey bag we set a plastic tote bin or a cooler, into which we put any and all materials we could conceivably require in the field. Some items make intuitive sense—like the gear for catching lizards (lizard poles, white cotton geology sample bags to put lizards in), roles of duct tape, fuse kits, or the LifeStraw Mission which allows us to have clean drinking water at all our sites. Some gear is maybe less obvious, like the staples and staplers (critical for stapling ID tags to each lizard bag) or the zip ties, the glue guns, and the pillowcases (for collecting snakes).
Then the fun really starts. We carefully inventory this gear and track which bag we put it in, and then stuff our personal gear in the interstitial spaces. All the while, we weigh and reweigh the bags so that we can optimize weight while filling out the volume. Every year, the bags just scrape in under the maximum weight of 50lbs/23kgs. Usually, heavy things go in the carryon’s, but… because this year we were flying Flair Airlines, we had to do some complicated machinations to ensure that no carryon was oversize or overweight. Since batteries can’t be checked (and neither can the cameras), it was like playing a very elaborate game of Jenga where the final boss was the bag sizer at the flair bag drop counter. Luckily, after some squishing (woe was my bag of chips), we all passed that hurdle.
In total this year we are traveling with five 23kg hockey bags across four people, each who also have a carryon (10kg) and a personal item (7kg). It’s a lot to shlep around and we do a lot of accidental running over toes. Mostly our own.
I’ve learned so much about this process over the last couple of years: the packing, the training, organizing. And I’ve only done this a couple of times. It is wild to think of the specialized skills and knowledge that comes from doing this for a decade, or over a career. And now, off to the Norman Manley International airport, Kingston, Jamaica.
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