Let this be a warnin' to ya

Lots of days, I did stupid things.

I feel like no blog about wildlife field research would be complete without some injury stories.

I also feel like nearly every time I've gone to work one of these jobs, particularly the ones with more ferocious-type beasts, my mom and dad bite their lips, try to still their quaking hearts, and spend the next few months expecting the phone to ring at any moment with the news that I was eaten by something with sharp teeth.

But in reality, I don't think I have ever been in fear for life or limb because of an animal.

A prelude: when I started the mountain lion job, I remember asking my boss Kevin how dangerous he felt the job was (after all, we were hiking - ALONE - to lion kills). He assured me that the likelihood of my being attacked by a lion was extremely low, provided I took the same reasonable precautions anybody should take when hiking in the woods in Carnivore Country. No, he said, no, you're more likely to be injured by falling down the crazy steep hills that abound along the Front Range. This I made sure to do, at least once. There's really no way to describe the feeling of suddenly losing your feet, finding them above your head the very next second, and then slamming your hips/butt into the rocks, then thanking your lucky stars that you stopped there and didn't continue rolling.

Well, I suppose I have three main stories about being injured in the field. I'm going to go in order of least exciting to most exciting, so skip to number three if you are desperate to be entertained.

1. Don't be a cheapskate. BUY BOOTS. 

My very first field research job was studying woodpeckers in South Dakota in the summer of 2005, in Custer State Park and Wind Cave National Park. I won't go into terribly much detail, but basically what my one coworker and I did was locate woodpecker nests by birdwatching (what a way to make a paycheck, eh?), then returning to each nest twice a week with an extendable camera to check on the eggs/chicks. We would record the number of eggs, the day they hatched, and the day they fledged (and how many made it that far).

Anyway, since this was my first field job, I really had no concept of the importance of proper footwear. And boots are expensive. And I was a poor college student. So I stubbornly refused to buy them, trekking out in the Black Hills with tennis shoes. This worked out well...for about a week.

One particular study area in Custer State Park looked like a Martian landscape, with flat, smooth, overlapping red rocks stacked haphazardly on top of each other, occasionally (and unexpectedly) loose in places, and pocked with rounded holes (aerial photo on the right). Also, since we were studying woodpeckers, and woodpeckers like dead trees, we were continually dodging deadfall with every step, adding to the difficulty. Oh, and they also were a favorite hangout of rattlesnakes. I had several near misses hiking around in that area.

One day, we were searching for a nest located somewhere in this area, and it was turning out to be difficult because the landscape looked pretty much identical everywhere you turned, and a single little pink ribbon marking the correct tree can be incredibly difficult to find. GPS units could only get you so far, but a lot of the time we'd get close and have to turn in circles looking for the spot. I was walking confidently, looking around as I went, trying to keep track of where I was placing my feet, when all of a sudden I just went down.

This was how it looked a week or so later.

I'm not sure exactly what happened; I must have slipped off the edge of one of the rocks, and twisted my ankle very, very badly; it was certainly the worst I've ever hurt my ankle, to this day. Luckily, it was the end of the day, and the end of the week, so I had the entire weekend to nurse it. I never went to see a doctor (PhD students are not typically the sort who want to deal with worker's comp forms, and our supervisor convinced me my ankle would get better on my own). However, in a relatively short amount of time I could walk pretty freely on it again, so I guess I lucked out.

I bought some boots the next day.


2. Don't be lazy. WEAR THE FREAKING BOOTS.

So, now I have boots, and I've always had a pair of boots for every field job ever after. However, I still don't particularly like to wear them when I don't have to, and this usually means I ride around with them in the truck and don't put them on until I need to do some hiking.

My current coworkers especially make fun of me for this. I don't honestly understand how people can wear those tight, hot, sweaty boots all day if they don't need to. I love the quote from "A Far Off Place", one of my favorite books: "Hadn't it been wonderful to recover the freedom of one's own feet after years of imprisonment in boots and shoes?" I suppose it could be a byproduct of my upbringing in the Arizona desert, where the weather really never gets bad enough to warrant closed-toed shoes of any kind. At any given time during my childhood I probably had 5 pairs of sandals/flip-flops, a couple pairs of dressy shoes, and a pair of tennis shoes for gym class. My first pair of boots were the ones I bought in South Dakota (in the above story) - I was 21 years old. I grew up with free feet and now they will never tolerate being confined.

Anyway, I really got into the habit of working in my sandals on the Mexican wolf project, since most of the time we were just driving around, triangulating on the wolves from our trucks, rarely having to do much hiking. I could easily just hop out of the truck in my sandals, take a bearing, hop back in, and speed away to the next site.

In New Mexico, when we couldn't hear a wolf's signal, one of our favorite places to go was the Negrito Lookout Tower. It was no longer manned, so we could climb up to the top and, most of the time, depending

on where the wolf was, the added height was enough for us to hear a signal. However, the road to Negrito was awful. I had a 4x4 truck, but the boulders on either side - and in the middle - of the narrow, steep road were huge, and I feared for my vehicle's undercarriage. Therefore, most of the time I would stop the truck before I reached the worst parts, and just walk up the rest of the road to the tower. Happily, I could do this in my flip flops, because however bad the road was, it was still a road. No problem.

One day, as I was creeping along up toward Negrito, I pulled over to begin the trek, but I was feeling particularly lazy. The road kind of curved around in a big arc (see picture) before finally getting to the tower, but if I just cut straight uphill through the woods, I could get there much faster.

I looked at the woods. It was a nice ponderosa pine forest, nice and open and inviting as they almost always are. Clearly no need for me to put my boots on. So I grabbed my gear and set off in my flip flops.

I hadn't gotten far when an unbelievable pain shot through the ball of my foot.

I had stepped on something that went right through my shoe and deep through the skin. I searched and searched on the ground around me and couldn't find anything that looked like it could be the culprit. But man, I was out for the count. The pain was even worse than spraining my ankle. There was hardly any blood, hardly even a puncture in my puny flip flop, but something had definitely done some damage.

I debated telling my boss. He didn't like me as it was, and, of course, there was the dreaded paperwork. I suffered in silence for a few days and then finally told him what happened. He frowned at me and told me what an idiot I was (because it was true), but he did say I could go to Show Low to get it looked at if I wanted to. But my stubbornness kicked in. He already hated me, and I would not give him reason to hate me more. Stupid. Yes.

Whatever happened - whether I actually fractured a bone in the bottom of my foot, or just got a really bad stone bruise - it took ages for it to heal. Months later, when I was in grad school, it would still ache occasionally.

I'd like to say I learned my lesson, but I suppose it's debatable. I still drive around with my boots in the truck, wearing my flip flops. However, I certainly put the boots on now whenever I go hike, even for just a short distance.

3. Bear spray. It works (on humans, at least).

This is one of my favorite stories to tell because a) there's a good lesson in it, b) people like to laugh at other people's pain, and c) for once, this time the injury wasn't entirely my fault.

Back to the mountain lion project, 2010...

bear spray

Whenever I went out hiking by myself, I typically carried a canister of bear spray in case I came face-to-face with a scavenging black bear at an old mountain lion kill, or a mountain lion itself. (We also carried bear spray all the time, even when hiking in groups, in Yellowstone because of the number of grizzlies there. I highly recommend doing this, and would not even consider hiking alone in Yellowstone, Glacier, or any other part of Bear Country without bear spray.) Bear spray is basically the same stuff in the typical can of mace on your keychain, just more of it, and stronger. I believe it has been proven very effective on bears, but nobody really knew what it would do to mountain lions. Still, I was too lazy to get my Concealed Carry license, and too cheap to buy a gun, so the free bear spray the Division of Wildlife let me use was going to have to do.

I usually had two backpacks with me every day, a small one just big enough for a bottle of water, some data sheets, and my Spot Unit (an emergency location device), and a bigger one that I put all my daily junk in and used whenever I had to go a greater distance and carry more food and water. As I said, I usually carried the bear spray whenever I was out alone. However, I sometimes didn't take it when I was doing shorter hikes, only a half mile or so away from the truck, because it didn't fit well in my small backpack. Also, when I was with another coworker, I wouldn't bother with it, since the odds were greater that an animal would hear us coming and leave, or be more hesitant to attack. Thus, much of the time my canister of bear spray got left in the truck.

One day, my coworker Kirstie and I were going to check out some data points in a canyon on some Open Space (public) land, just off of Flagstaff Road above Boulder. The road was too
rough for the truck, but we had brought along our ATV. We unloaded it and sped off down the road. I only took a small bag with my water and some other supplies, leaving my larger backpack - and can of bear spray - in the backseat of the truck. We collected the data, turned around, and came back to the truck within the span of about an hour.

When we got back, we loaded up the ATV, and then Kirstie and I prepared to head back to Fort Collins. I opened the little side-door behind the driver's seat, threw my little backpack on top of my bigger backpack, and instantly got a face-full of mace.

Evidently the safety had come off the canister. And the nozzle was pointed directly at me. When my little backpack hit it, it fired off a pretty good dose, directly into my right eye.

Nothing can describe the agony. You'd have to experience it yourself to know how it feels. I doubled over and clasped my hands to my face. Kirstie instantly knew what happened; she had been standing on the other side of the truck, putting things in the passenger seat, in the fresh air, away from the direction of the spray, and yet the instant it went off, she started coughing. That stuff is potent. She rushed over to me and handed me a Camelbak, and I lifted my head and rinsed my eye as best I could.

I was probably spared some pain by my contact lens absorbing some of the blast. I peeled it off and threw it on the dirt. After a couple of minutes, the pain in my eye subsided somewhat, and Kirstie and I decided to get back to Fort Collins as soon as possible. On the drive, I called the Poison Control Center to see if I needed medical attention. Luckily, they assured me I didn't; the stuff was just intended to be an irritant, not to cause serious chemical burns.

The stinging in my eye didn't last very long...but wasn't the only effect. It got all over my skin, too, on my face and some on my right arm. For days, I felt like I had gotten a horrible sunburn, my skin hot and tender to the touch. And my poor truck... for about a week afterward nobody could get into it without coughing, until the residue finally went away.

So, if you ever doubt the usefulness of bear spray, I can assure you that it works. I can't imagine any bear - or mountain lion - getting sprayed with that stuff and not being completely discombobulated, at least for a few minutes; enough time, anyway, for you to get away. And if you don't have any other weapon, it's certainly a great thing to have.

But the main lesson of the story: when not in use, always make sure the safety's on.

I have a canister of my own bear spray now, and you can bet I'm extremely careful with it.

(In recommending bear spray, I feel the need to emphasize that anyone who uses it needs to be aware of several things: they do expire and they do need to be tested periodically.)