Field work while parenting: an ideal summer in the mountains

By Chris Adlam

The bear really did it for me. Or was it the rattlesnake? Or maybe the daily menagerie of lizards, toads and garter snakes my 5-year-old held up happily for our inspection. I thought, “this is what field research while parenting should look like!”

My partner Rosemary, our two children (5 and 2) and myself were camping in the Klamath Mountains of Northern California for 6 weeks while I gathered data on the effect of wildfires on forest life. The Klamaths are easily the most remote area on the Pacific coast of the United States, typically ignored even by tourists, though the Pacific Crest Trail begrudgingly does a westerly detour through the high country. A few communities along the rushing Salmon River, relicts of the gold rush, were never connected to the grid. Bigfoot is everywhere. Tribal cultures, including the Karuk, Hoopa and Yurok, nurture a vibrant connection to ancestral lands marked everywhere by millennia of traditional care, from tanoak and sugar pine orchards to ancient village sites and spiritual trails.

The Klamaths are also exceedingly steep, poison oak is ubiquitous, mosquitoes are locally overwhelming and temperatures in summer soar to the three digits. So would our offspring take to living in this rugged place for half the summer, or would they be miserable? Would we all be miserable in this paradise? The last time we camped, we’d only gone a couple of days before hearing the tireless refrain of “I want to go home!”

This summer’s research was going to be critical to my PhD project. Though I have years of field experience, I had never organized a field season from scratch. I was also going to bring along two interns, whose needs I would have to attend to in addition to my family’s. Wanting to avoid last minute scrambles, I started organizing months in advance, including making packing lists, storing research and camping gear in plastic tubs for the day it would be needed, and really dialing in my protocol to avoid hang-ups. I designed my schedule to have a reasonable daily load so I could spend time with my family and also so I could be flexible if changes needed to be made in the field.

When we arrived at our destination, we had the entire campground to ourselves. We quickly investigated river access, which would turn out to be a key ingredient in spending a happy summer in the wilderness. Rosemary would go to the river with the kids every morning while I was off doing surveys. When I returned around lunch time, I would join them and sometimes take our oldest on a trip down the river in our inflatable paddle boat (though for all my organizational frenzy I hadn’t actually brought paddles!). Or we would build dams on small tributaries. We waded in search of water life, catching tadpoles, small fish, and, once, a lamprey. We collected dead butterflies and dragonflies and poked at scat piles. We would end our adventures looking for wood for the campfire, which was mostly unnecessary but very entertaining.

The kids were never bored and never complained about camping. They seemed to flourish and settled right in to our new rhythm. They became very relaxed playing and swimming in the river (with life jackets). Our youngest stopped needing diapers. They became experts at identifying poison oak, and no one got it, which was a miracle. Being in nature was relaxing and nurturing, for them and for us.

I love UC Davis as a school, but Davis is flat, surrounded by industrial agriculture, and generally a very unnatural place. Our time in the Klamaths was a perfect antidote for this. We visited an elk lick and walked on the deeply worn trails they made on their daily rounds; the scent of the herd was heavy and we could hear the cows calling in the distance. We cautiously investigated a rattlesnake, which seemed more intent on making a ruckus than actually striking. And then of course, there was the bear.

My oldest had asked to visit the elk lick at dusk, but we found it deserted. We continued to a meadow beyond, and as we squinted into the failing light, a dark shaped detached itself from the background. It was a black bear, and a good-sized one too. We watched it amble about, eating from abandoned pear trees. Though mosquitoes were settling all over us, I whispered that if we didn’t move, we’d be able to keep watching the bear. Still it didn’t notice us, and started walking on the trail that headed our way. I usually see bears running away when I’m driving. Never had I been in such a situation! When it got to about 20 meters from us, I decided to clear my throat, at which point it stood up on its hind legs, clearly confused (I was realizing what terrible eyesight they have!), and finally decided to go another way. For my son’s first bear encounter, this was the encounter of a lifetime!

So, it was a pretty ideal field-season-while-parenting, with science done and magical experiences all around. I almost wish there were some crises here and there to add nuance. Of course, I was incredibly fortunate that my partner was willing and able to come along so I didn’t have to be away from my loved ones for all this time. Not many people are this lucky. My protocol was also perfect since I started bird counts before dawn and wrapped up by noon, leaving the rest of the day to hang out with the family. If my protocol had been more demanding or required night-time surveys for example, this would have been difficult to reconcile with kids’ rhythms. It would have been challenging too if we’d had to move every day or every few days; the kids took some time to get used to a new place and would have been stressed by frequent moves (not to mention the logistics of packing and unpacking everything).

On the other hand, I think that part of the success was in fact not in spite of parenting but because of it. Of course, having kids inevitably means I can’t spend as much time on my work as non-parents. But I have learned to be better organized to make up for this, which is common for parents in academia (see for example my friend Jamiella Brooks’ essay on how to finish your dissertation while parenting: https://ideasonfire.net/dissertating-while-parenting/). I had backups for all my equipment, checklists, and built-in flexibility in my schedule. And I had excellent interns who were very understanding about my family needs. By the end of the field season, we were all already looking forward to doing this again next year!

Stumbling and toddling through (field)work: the first two years

By Seeta Sistla

Setting up micrometeorological stations 39 weeks pregnant and consumed by an early summer heat wave was less challenging than I had imagined it would be. Holding my month old child while trying to coordinate a small new field project proved more challenging – and ultimately unfeasible.  In the 2 years since the birth of our first child, my learning curve combining motherhood with ecological research has been sometimes steep but always worthwhile.

I became a parent early in my career as an ecology professor at a small liberal arts college. Without the support of family due to a combination of distance and our own aging parents, my husband (also an academic) and I have been largely on our own to embark in the new world of parenting while also trying to build our field research-based careers.  In the first year of my son’s life, my remote field work took a break while I focused on learning to be a new parent, navigating occasional stints of lone parenting while my husband was away for extended periods for his own research, 8-hour field courses which required (subtly) pumping milk in a class van, and those who remarked that parental leave is like a holiday (which I am grateful was balanced by others who recognized a period of reduced professional responsibilities after becoming a parent should be the norm rather than the exception).

While there have been distinct challenges – ranging from scheduling field and lab work around my son’s daycare schedule to attending a national meeting with a 14 month old while my husband’s research project took him across the world – we’ve also experienced a myriad of unexpected benefits. When my son has joined me in the field and lab, we have always been with students, whose curiosity and excitement is amplified by showing him why they’re doing the tasks at hand.

Our son's first time in daycare was at the 2017 Ecological Society of America meeting. The childcare providers were wonderful.  But frightened by the myriad of changes, he didn't last more than 2 hours. We attended the meeting together after that, which was challenging, but mostly successful

Earlier this summer, I had my first major field excursion since becoming a parent– over 2 weeks in a remote area of western Alaska accessible only by float plane – while my son stayed home with my husband. Although I would love to introduce my son to the Arctic, because of the nature of my field work, traveling as a family is neither practical nor safe. While I deeply worried for how our son would deal with my travel and lack of communication, in the end, I am grateful to report it was me who suffered his absence rather than the reverse. While my husband had already been away for multiple weeks in far flung locales since our son was born, I had serious reservations about traveling for so long and with so little potential for contact when my son had just turned two. In retrospect, it was a liberating experience for our whole family, and I encourage other young parents to feel confident in their decision to continue to pursue their research ambitions flexibly – with or without their children as possible and desired.

I’m writing this piece from Namibia – where I am the trailing spouse for my husband’s work. We’ve visited beautiful national parks and an ecological research station in the Namib Desert, walked across dunes and besides one of world’s largest sea lion colonies. My son has picked up every imaginable iteration of scat and skeleton fragment, combed the red Kalahari sand, and exclaimed with joy when we found fluorescent scorpions on night hikes. But, finding childcare was a large stumbling block, leading to moments of profound frustration as we tried to manage work obligations while also entertaining a 2 year old (who was missing other kids) in an extended stay hotel where freely playing outside was impossible.

Exploring the Namib Desert.
Scorpions, sand-hiding snakes, and the scorching sun
could not stop our son.

We ultimately found a combination of a playgroup and babysitter by asking US Embassy staff (who often travel as families) and local parents that we met in passing for advice. Learning from our experience, we now realize that when planning lengthy travel for field work, we must be proactive in finding a space and context that will accommodate the shifting needs of our growing son, which will likely mean extending our planned time away to accommodate finding necessities (i.e. a playgroup, safe and reliable childcare).  

Parenting in general, and especially when trying to combine the endeavor with one’s work, requires remembering to laugh when things don’t go as planned. Like when we tried to participate in the opening event for artist David Buckley Borden’s ‘Hemlock Hospice’ instillation within the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research Site, which went well until we and had to step off to tour while our son wailed at not being able to touch the art.

Things were going well until they weren’t.
A family visit to the Hemlock Hospice exhibit
among the dying hemlocks in the
Harvard Forest LTER, Pertersham, MA. 

Having our son has changed my relationship with my work and in many ways fundamentally shifted how I move through my days. Our tiny child also makes me all the more aware of the enormous environmental challenges he will face and motivates me as an educator while also encouraging me to live in the moment and continue to find wonder in the natural (and human) world.