#fieldwork tag

So weird having a job where it's like "ah dang I have to go sleep on the ground in the woods tonight. For work."

At our job training in California last week the company CEO was giving a little presentation about daily life as a murrelet surveyor and at one point talked about how we have to get our mileage logs turned in every Friday, and was saying "Yeah we need to get those in on Friday cus our accounting people have to go through them every couple weeks and it makes it way harder if you're not doing it regularly" and I halfway interrupted and went "If you don't turn in your mileage log on time Paula will come to your house and start beating you with hammers" and he just immediately rolls with it and goes "Yeah she will do that actually. So make sure you get that done on time"

ALSO at work yesterday I ran into a guy who had SIX (6!!) coonhounds with him and was out driving around the woods to exercise them. He would go "Go on!" and they'd all jump off the back of the truck and start running around and then he'd go "Back up!" and they'd all jump back onto the truck. When he stopped to talk to me one of them hopped off the truck and came to check me out and he goes "Megan. Get back up here" and she just huffed and hopped back on the truck it was so funny

Omg I was on a video call with my boss the other day and he just leans down and picks up a cat and drapes it over his shoulders like a scarf. Cat completely fine with this. He's just sitting there using this cat's toe beans as a fidget toy as he talks. Not even his cat it's his housemates cat.

So one part of my new job is literally just. Walking along transects in an 85m radius underneath wind turbines looking for dead animals. And we have to follow the specific transect lines that are shown on the GPS. But. unfortunately. There are sometimes fences in the way. So I've been doing this job for One day and I've already had to climb over/under/between barbed wire fences Fourteen (14) times