I have just finished almost three months of fieldwork, chasing black rhinos around in Laikipia, Kenya. As the second field season of my PhD winds down, I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on the challenges and quirks that this very odd kind of work presents. Compared to a lot of fieldwork, mine is really quite cushy. Electricity, Wi-fi, food cooked for me, a proper bed, hot water most of the time and access to chocolate and beer. Despite all this comfort, fieldwork is always hard. You disappear from your normal life for a few months, travel to a remote area of a country that is very different to home, are thrust into a small community of people you haven’t met before and you have to get on with your work. I’ve missed a festival, a holiday and a bunch of other fun things that I could have been doing with my friends. It’s dusty, it’s dirty, it’s hot. You work long and odd hours and it is often genuinely dangerous. It isn’t the snakes or the creepy crawlies you need to worry to about, or even the lions, the hyenas and leopards. It’s the buffaloes, the elephants and other cars on the roads that are the things to watch out for.
Writing all this down here it sounds terrible. I mean I have just got to my hotel in Nairobi and felt so dirty that I took my shorts off before I sat on the bed. So why do we do it? It’s certainly not for the money. Looking back over spending almost six months out of the last twelve in Kenya, I promise you that it is much more fun than it sounds. From my perspective, we do it for three reasons.
Firstly, you get to spend time in some of the most amazing places and with some of the most amazing animals in the world. People pay thousands to come on safari to the reserves I work on. I have seen a bunch of species for the first time on this trip. Serval, aardwolf, striped hyena, and my first proper leopard sighting. It’s nice to have people visit who haven’t spent much time here before because it makes you realise how special these places are. Giraffes, warthogs and impala become commonplace very quickly, but seeing someone else be excited by these animals brings home how cool these things are.
Secondly, you get to meet some incredible people. It’s a bit like the start of uni, you’re living on top of a bunch of people you don’t know and you have to make friends quickly or you’ll go crazy. The nice thing that everyone is pretty like-minded and I’ve met some people who I otherwise would never have stumbled across. The slight downside to this is that you get used to saying goodbye to people. It’s always a bit of a wrench to live with people 24/7 for months and then you suddenly leave and don’t see them again. But you do leave with a network of friends who live all around the world and keeping in touch with them is something that Facebook is actually good for.
Finally, and most importantly, you believe in the work that you’re doing. I would not give up so much of my time to be here unless I thought it was worth it. Hopefully, the results of my research will directly contribute to the conservation of black rhinos. People I have met here are doing some amazing work and are often sacrificing a good chunk of their twenties to do so. No one I have met is here because they feel they should be, everyone desperately wants to be. As a society we are tearing great holes in our ecosystem. People have to be willing to stand up and be counted, work for conservation and shout about why they think other species have a right to exist on this planet alongside us.
Fieldwork certainly has its ups and its downs. Every now and again I’m crouched on a dusty road changing the second flat tyre of the day or sat in a lab at 10pm weighing out dung and I wonder why I do this. But then I get to spend a morning watching rhinos or the sun go down over the savannah and I remember that I wouldn’t change it for the world.