Cows are a serious field work hazard. Seriously.
We are doing a significant amount of our work mapping ant distributions on some property that used to be a cattle ranch and now belongs to the National Park. Despite no longer, technically, being a cattle ranch there is a surprisingly large population of cows roaming the premises. Sure, one cow isn’t so scary, but when you walk around a bend in the road and suddenly find 50 of them staring at you (and believe me, cows stare), then they are a little intimidating. So far they always run away, but what if one morning a cow woke up and realized, “Hey, I am bigger then a person!”. Suddenly the cows wouldn’t be running away, in fact, they might even be running towards me; and that is a scary thought.
An additional fun thing that comes with cows is fencing. Barbed wire is annoying, but fairly obvious. It’s the electric fences that you have to watch out for. You would think, being a Berkeley graduate and all, that I would be smart enough not to get shocked by the cow fence… that would, however, be an incorrect assumption. So, life is generally good, except that I manage to run into an electric cow fence about once a day. Which, amusing to me, I watch a cow jump clear over today. Clearly those fences are working.
And, if getting myself shocked by the fence wasn’t bad enough, today I got my boss shocked, too. I was setting out the baitcards for the ant survey and flagging each one. My boss was an hour behind, checking each card and removing the flagging. After five hours of this we reconvene and she looked a tad bit peeved.
Calmly she asked, “ are you mad at me?”.
My response “umm, no… why?”.
And her answer, “ Because you were tying your flagging tape to the electric fence.”
Oops? I guess I won’t be asking for a letter of recommendation any time soon…. In my defense, the fence is the most obvious place to tie the flagging, and my usual ant mapping partner has yet to complain about getting shocked by it.
In conclusion, I am not unsure which is the bigger fieldwork hazard, me or the cows.