A further case of classic field biology, sucker…

There’s a “job” posting on the ECOLOG mailing list today for a internship tracking coyotes in Northern Yellowstone from May til September. The posting advises that the experimental protocol includes a broad variety of elements, with 90% of the job requiring capabilities for sustained physical work under demanding field conditions. Housing is in a remote setting, with very basic dormitory accommodations. Be aware that your $400/month stipend will be pro-rated for partial months. Which eliminates the angle of getting rich off those partial months.

And yet, somebody is going to do this and they’re going to secretly love it and it’s going to start their career. In a way, I almost envy them. Yellowstone is an old-school American National Park, in the same vein as Yosemite. It’s absolutely gorgeous, it has a deeply incongrous highway of steady road traffic running through it in a loop, and I suspect that like Yosemite if you get out of the main highway-fed valley by even an hour’s hiking there’s probably nobody around at all. Somebody is going to go there and spend their days hiking the backcountry with a telemetry rig, seeing the range from every angle and in all weather, mixing their solitude with the howling of coyotes and sun striping the mountains and coming home to the oddball bustle of a little biological research station at night. Housing is included, and $400/month will buy you a month’s food in nearby Bozeman, so if you’ve got enough cash in your pocket to get there you will at least not come away any poorer. This is the second time this posting has come up, last time it was for Feb to June. They’re calling themselves a “long term” ecological study now, so I guess if they keep up their funding and you’ve got a biology degree and are highly competent in back-country settings, show a high degree of initiative and motivation, and [are] able to work long hours in the field, you could make a little break-even career out of it.

I am told by those I have lived with who have done long-term telemetry work in wilderness areas that it gets pretty monotonous, but they still failed to make it sound like it wasn’t a beautiful job in it’s way.

This is the weird life-cycle of wildlife biologists, we go to school and get science degrees like anyone going into the pharmaceutical or agriculture or biotech industries, and then we take these slave-wage jobs working as heavy lifters in the back of beyond. But somehow no one’s really complaining. Maybe we just can’t make up our minds if we should or not.