Ecology Fieldwork and Teaching Adventures with Children

By Andrea Worthington, Ph.D. Professor emeritus, Biology, Siena College, Loudonville, NY

I have spent my career teaching field courses in Plant Ecology and Tropical Biology at a small college in upstate New York.  With my husband’s help, I took all my children with me in the field for weekend field trips.  When I started teaching Tropical Biology, first in Puerto Rico and then in Costa Rica, I brought my husband and children along.  My husband and I collaborate on research, examining the prey capture behavior of dragonflies and the neuro-ethology of prey capture.  The history of my academic career is tightly woven to accommodate raising children.

I know that working while having babies requires lots of creativity. The best decision I made was to commit to breast feeding.  My first born arrived in March and I had already arranged an unpaid leave for the spring semester to care for my son.  When I had to return to work, I was very lucky to find a care-giver who was also a nursing mom and she was willing to help me. My plan was to nurse my first born during all my time at home including through the night. My care-giver knew how to offer water with a sippy cup to my son who was just 6 months old when I returned to work in the Fall. My daughter was born 5 years later in June but I also took an unpaid leave in the Fall.

I was hired by a four-year college to teach Plant Ecology (along with many other courses).  Every year, the Plant Ecology course would spend a weekend in the Adirondacks visiting sphagnum bogs and climbing a mountain collecting data on how plant communities change with altitude.  We would tent camp and cook meals on camp stoves.  Class sizes would vary from 15 to 30.  My husband came with me and so did our children as they arrived. I also invited colleagues (with or without children) to join us.  I found that having children present really led to more community and helpful behavior in the field. It also tamped down unwanted behaviors such as the urge to 1) sneak in beer and party when we camped and 2) race to the top of the mountain.

The following three photos are from various trips to study tree gradients on Adirondack Mts in Plant Ecology lab.

We would camp out Friday nights and hit the trails early Saturday to reach the summit collecting data on plant community structure and diversity on the way.

My son’s first Adirondack adventure was when he was 1½ years old. He was still nursing at the time.  He participated in 14 mountain data-collecting assents. My daughter’s first Adirondack adventure was when she was 1 years old. She was also nursing.  She participated in 12 mountain data-collecting assents. Thank heavens for child backpack carriers. With the help of my husband and other colleagues that joined us, the students collected data at each elevation interval gain and we got everyone to the top of the mountain. My children learned to identify plants and, as they got older, they were great teaching assistants.

The first time I taught Tropical Ecology, my son was 10 months old. The course was co-taught and we had a winter break trip to Puerto Rico.  My husband came along to care for our son while I was supervising student research.  Our son took his first steps in El Yunque National Forest.

The first time we taught Tropical Ecology in Costa Rica, my co-teacher brought his wife and their 2 year old child and I brought my husband and both our children (our son was 16 and our daughter was 12).

Author's daughter mist-netting birds with co-instructor and students

Author and son viewing monkeys in Costa Rica

We visited 3 different field stations covering various different tropical plant communities…traveling by bus and living in field station dormitories.  It was so helpful to have curious young people at any age.  The 1 year old loved the leaf cutter ants.

Costa Rica Tropical Biology Field Course

Again, traveling with families really impacted the student behavior. I would say they were a fabulous addition since they were constantly curious and had a wonderful ability to observe and discover creatures. They were great assistants in student projects. The students included them in their social activities too which I think damped down possible chaos.

The children also went along to international professional society meetings, along with field trips.

Worldwide Dragonfly Association 

Meeting in Sweden

Our children over the years helped us with our research on the neuro-ethology of prey capture behavior in dragonflies.  They helped us dig a backyard pond to attract dragonflies.

Building a backyard dragonfly pond to raise animals for research.

The have helped us collect dragonfly larvae and adults in the field.  They have helped us video prey capture behavior in the field. Each did independent research projects on dragonflies for high school honors research.

So after all that exposure to science, what have they chosen to do with their lives?  My son is a musician and is a partner in a music production studio and my daughter is working on a Ph.D. in plant genetics.

Fieldwork with family in Madagascar

Lovely story about a paleontologist who does her research in Madagascar, along with her children and spouse, who studies lemurs.  The story glances over the twenty years they have
Spent doing research there, and offers practical advice for things to bring and getting started.

https://fieldsecrets.wordpress.com/2019/01/17/paleontologist-mom/

Decades of Visiting a Greenland Field Site with Children

In this recent blog post, Pernille Sporon Boving shares an interview with her 3 children about their thoughts on climate change and climate change actions.  Interspersed among the Q&A are photos of the children from their Greenland field site over the last 2 decades.  We hope to have Eric, Pernille, and the three children write a post about their experience as a family in the field.

https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/what-can-i-do/youth-climate-views-keep-calm-and-vote-on/

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. 

Geography Fieldwork With Family

"Fieldwork...With Family", published by The Geographical Review in 2001, is a lovely and poetic look at the ways doing fieldwork with a family can influence your experience.   The authors include Paul F. Starrs (Distinguished Professor geography), Lynn Huntsinger (Professor of Rangeland Ecology and Management), and their two daughters (Carlin and Genoa) - all contributing their own perspective to this tale.  This includes a detailed discussion of the logistics of extended international travel with a family, as well as having older children as field assistants.  

Some of my favorite quotes include:

"Let me also be honest and say that, at least for my family and others I know, working in the field together is excitement, a spice to life, the best form of wild ride." "Research was not as I had known it-not worse, but different." "Some of the Indiana Jonesish aspects of fieldwork do get shoved on the shelf when you are accompanied; but for those you can always go back alone, or break off for a stretch."

Professor Starrs was kind enough to share an update about his daughters, they are now 27 and nearly 29.  They're still stalwart fieldworkers, one in Kauai, Hawaii, and the other currently staff at UC Berkeley.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2001.tb00460.x

Multiple Situations, Multiple Solutions - Nature article

This article, work–life balance: Kid-friendly digs, by Kendall Powell was published in Nature in 2014.  It shares the stories of multiple researchers, in many different science fields, and how they all manage different types of fieldwork and travel with families.  

https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7519/full/nj7519-575a.html

International, Tropical, Treetop, Single Parenting

Meg Lowman is an american-born international biologist and ecologist, with expertise in tropical rainforest canopy ecology, canopy plant-insect relationships, and constructing canopy walkways.  She is also an educator, author, editor, adventurer, public speaker, AND single mother of two boys who she brought with her in the field.  Those two boys have since both graduated from Princeton in the sciences.

This is a great article, talking about her accomplishments and how she managed this - http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2006/09/case-study-mom-scientist-canopy-meg

Here is an excerpt from the article "...Lowman's most important innovation was this: she turned longer field expeditions into family trips, taking her two sons to remote regions of four continents. "We have shared adventures in the Amazon, dangling from trees together, walking on canopy bridges, learning medicinal plants from a shaman, eating insects, spotting scarlet macaws, and just getting muddy," she writes in It’s a Jungle Up There. "Experiencing the world through three pairs of eyes has enriched my life far beyond relying on my own view alone."  The article itself talks about more of the logistics.

I have had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Lowman speak twice, and read her first book, "Life in the Treetops".  I found the stories shared very inspirational, and I often reflect on them as I am trying to navigate research and parenthood myself.  I highly recommend the book, and It's a Jungle Up There, written in collaboration with her sons, is next on my list.

Dr. Lowman is currently the Director of Global Initiatives, Lindsay Chair of Botany, & Senior Scientist in Plant Conservation at the California Academy of Sciences.  In 2014, she joined this organization as the Chief of Science and Sustainability, and was responsible for the programs of scientific research and exploration.  She was previously a Professor at North Carolina State University and the founding director of North Carolina’s Nature Research Center at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.  Her list of nicknames is almost as impressive as the list of honors, including “Mother of Canopy Research”, “Canopy Meg”, “real-life Lorax”, and the “Einstein of the treetops”.  

Anthropology fieldwork with children, sometimes kids get sick

An article by Dr. Reetta Toivanen, an Adjunct Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology and a Finnish Academy Research Fellow at the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki. 

She discusses how her children help her make contact with everyday people while traveling.  She also shares a journal entry from a particularly harrowing travel time when her child fell ill. 

http://allegralaboratory.net/fieldwork-with-children/

Anthropology Fieldwork with Kids in China - Book

There is an entire book about doing anthropology fieldwork in China with children, aptly titled "Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids!", by Candice Cornet and Tami Blumenfield, which chronicles the experiences of 7 researchers.    

Emily Chao PhD at Pitzer College provides an in-depth summary of the book here.  The brief description of the book provided through Amazon.com is below.

"While many anthropologists and other scholars relocate with their families in some way or another during fieldwork periods, this detail is often missing from their writings even though undoubtedly children can have had a major impact on their work. Recognizing that researcher-parents have many choices regarding their children's presence during fieldwork, this volume explores the many issues of conducting fieldwork with children, generally, and with children in China, specifically. Contributors include well-established scholars who have undertaken fieldwork in China for decades as well as more junior researchers. The book presents the voices of mothers and of fathers, with two particularly innovative pieces that are written by parent - child pairs. The collection as a whole offers a wide range of experiences that question and reflect on methodological issues related to fieldwork, including objectivity, cultural relativism, relationships in the field and positionality. The chapters also recount how accompanied fieldwork can offer unexpected ethnographic insights.An appendix alerts future fieldworking parents to particular pitfalls of accompanied fieldwork and suggests ways to avoid these." 

Anthropology Fieldwork with Children - Panel

This Inside Higher Ed article by Elizabeth Redden shares multiple stories of women conducting anthropology fieldwork with their children.  These stories were from a panel on fieldwork and mothering at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in 2008.  Great job AAA for hosting this panel!

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/25/anthro

Jane Goodall, Too

"On March 4th, 1967, Hugo Eric Louis Van Lawick was born to Jane Goodall and Hugo van Lawick. Hugo was born in Nairobi during one of the pair's expedition. Their son was always called Grub ... Grub spent most of his childhood in the Serengeti, observing chimpanzees with his parents."

https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/jane-goodall--22

Nocturnal Wildlife Fieldwork in India with Toddler

Inspiring post by Kaberi Kar Gupta about her PhD fieldwork in India with her child - http://lorises.blogspot.com/2012/05/couple-of-days-ago-i-got-email-from.html