Mistakes

We’ve entered the busiest stretch of the field schedule. All the cameras have been deployed once, and we are in the midst of collecting them from their current tree, downloading and reviewing the photos, and deploying them in a different tree the following day. Most days we have to climb two trees and a few unfortunate days we have to do three, which is as much a mental challenge as it is physical. I realize I haven’t gotten too much into the details of how the climbing is done, but just to give you a basic idea, here is a video that Owen took of me the other day of one of the more taxing parts of a climb.

Going up and down in the tree is actually reasonably simple and while time consuming, it is not by any means the most challenging part of the climb. Moving laterally once you get into the tree is far more difficult and, as you can see in the video, incredibly slow!

I’ve gotten a lot of messages from people wishing me well and reminding me to stay safe, which is clearly always a priority. We do a pretty good job of staying rested when we’re not in the forest because every part of this work takes its toll on you. Still, in the middle of these couple weeks of intense work, the signs of exhaustion are starting to set in. I am aware of the fact that in the grand scheme of “exhaustion” mine is pretty tame, as I have never raised a child, held down a normal person job, battled severe illness or done anything else that constitutes true exhaustion in the real world.

The problem with exhaustion or fatigue when you are doing things that require such intense concentration is that it is an open invitation for mistakes, which can sometime be costly when you are swinging in a tree 100 feet in the air, an hour from the field station, and miles from medical attention. We’ve been lucky that the problems we’ve run into so far have been pretty tame and we are remaining vigilant to ensure that this pattern continues. Here are a few of the setbacks we’ve hit thus far:

• We had fondly come to refer to one of the trees on our list as “the most perfect tree ever created” because of all the branches and vegetation in the crown were ideally suited for setting up cameras (see photo below taken in “dramatic mode” on my camera). Despite the fact that over the course of the past few weeks we’ve seen and identified well over a hundred examples of our target species and had visited the tree in question twice already, we were quite disheartened to realize that it was, in fact, the wrong species. I’d like to attribute this little blunder to mental fatigue, but more likely I’m just an idiot.    
  

• The sound of anything falling – a branch, a rope, a piece of equipment – always, always, makes my heart stop momentarily. You can never tell exactly what or how important it is until you check yourself and your climbing partner. If I’m in the tree and Owen is on the ground, anything falling could cause serious harm. We always yell “Headache!” when something is falling and just hope that the other person has the sense to keep his helmet facing the sky and not look up at whatever is crashing down. Drops happen, we’re careful to avoid them, but it’s a reality of dealing with so many items (throwing lines and bags, cameras, webbing straps, bungees, knives, string, etc.) in the tree. We are obviously extremely careful with the cameras themselves and take every precaution with them, as they are very valuable ($550 each!) and most of them are not mine. Also, any time a decently large branch falls anywhere nearby it is indistinguishable from the sound of a person crashing down to the forest floor, a nightmarish thought that I have never been able to shake. So far the most important thing I’ve dropped is a screw from a camera mount, and I intend to keep it that way. We tend to have extras of whatever we bring in the tree, but there are some items that are irreplaceable and if we ever drop a carabiner or other piece of climbing hardware it can form microcracks in the metal and thus has to be retired from use. 
  

• The other day I realized halfway out to our tree that in my early morning stupor I had put my underwear on backward. Not wanting to go skin-to-the-wind in the middle of the forest (recall previous post about biting bugs), I was forced to walk around all day with a little sweat diaper hanging in the back of my pants (see if you can guess what kind of underwear I chose that day – hint, it’s not what you think).
  

There are probably dozens of other examples to choose from, I do stupid things all the time, but I’ll leave it at that for now. Time for some much-needed rest, we’ve got another big day coming up.