A False Sense of Field Safety
Whether you’re a seasoned biologist, early-career or mid-level professional, a student pondering which major to declare as an undergraduate, or an interested individual who has little or no understanding of what the field of conservation biology or in the outdoor industry entails, here’s a few insights I’d like to share that folks in leadership or maybe some of your professors haven’t been honest about or have prepped you with. Most likely, because folks have been privileged with never having to fear for their safety while out in the field or have assimilated into the system for far too long to get to where they’re at, advocating and speaking up about mistreatment still seems like a big no-no.
Even in 2024, the field of conservation is still a good ole boys’ club, and if you want to get a permanent biologist position, it’s best to keep your head down, mouth shut, put up with unsafe working conditions, and continue following arbitrary rules that someone from the 70s conservation era movement created and has yet to be updated. For so long, safety and well-being have been a conversation that’s been swept under the rug, but it’s probably a good time to start bringing the topic to light and hold one another accountable for taking better care of each other. Otherwise, you’ll lose out on good people who are needed in the field of conservation, and that doesn’t seem like a long-term sustainable solution.
I’ve had plenty of injuries throughout my time doing seasonal fieldwork and enough times when the people I was working with were not prepared to help me or themselves in these scenarios.
In 2019, during a stream survey in a dry gully in southern Oregon, my coworker and I stumbled upon a ground hornet’s nest. My survey partner went ahead of me, and the next thing I knew, what felt like my skin getting hammered with hot nails was radiating throughout my body. I was stung about a dozen times by bald-faced hornets. It took 30 minutes to hike from the backcountry to our truck and another half hour to drive to the nearest ER. Since it was a government job, antihistamines weren’t provided in first aid, but I had packed some in my personal medical kit and was able to take them since I didn’t know how my body was going to react to the stings. My body experienced excruciating nerve pain. A cortisol shot to the hip, which ended up hurting a lot more than I expected, a bottle of liquid courage, and 12 hours later, I was back to work surveying another creek. Coming into the seasonal job, I obtained multiple wilderness first aid certificates that, by then, exceeded 150 hours of training and coursework. Unfortunately, more than any of the other employees or crew leads had. The paperwork I had to fill out for the accident was bureaucratic, and the only sympathy I was met with was from a few individuals sharing their stories of getting stung by wasps or bees and how it “wasn’t that bad.”
For context, I obtained my:
CPR/First Aid/AED certification
Expires every two years
Wilderness First Aid (WFA)*
Wilderness First Responder (WFR)*
Recertification in a 16-24-hour WFR refresher course every two years
* Also, needs updated CPR/First Aid/AED and epi-pen to obtain certifications.
While I never wish injuries upon anyone when they’re in the outdoors, accidents do happen, and it’s best to be prepared than to wish you knew what to do. Since most of these skills only stay with you through practice and keeping up-to-date with current acceptable ways to deal with emergencies in the backcountry, it’s best to schedule this in your annual gear prep/reset. By no means am I telling you to go hiking every day and find as many injured persons on the trail as you can to practice, but what I’m telling you is, skim through course content every few months, fill out a practice SOAP sheet, restock your medical kit before each big adventure and understand how to use each item in it, and make sure to stay on top of your recertifications.
Grayling Education had the honor of presenting alongside Heather Hodson from United Women on the Fly and Erik Johnsen from TroutRoutes at a monthly virtual education seminar on field safety hosted by Fly Fish Instruct. The topic of choice was animal safety, primarily focusing on large mammals, such as bears, in hopes of using them as a blueprint for gaining insight on how to keep yourself safe through learning more about their biology, maintaining a sense of respect for wildlife, and understanding how to interact and coexist with our furry friends. While grizzly bears aren’t widespread, the hope is for folks to transfer the knowledge learned across locations and implement the newfound information to the predator or large ungulate in the individual’s area.
Safety can encompass many things - working conditions, prejudice, racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, transphobia, and almost any other -isms and -phobias you can come up with. Since it’s impossible to tackle all safety topics in just one post, we suggest whoever’s reading this continue the conversation offline and with the organizations, agencies, and institutions that still have outdated safety policies and plans.
In the summer of 2023, I shared one of my stories with the Audubon Magazine for the “Fieldwork for All” article, which highlighted many incredible biologists who have unfortunately experienced unsafe working conditions during their career. It was also a story of one of my last jobs as an early-career technician working directly with fish. The emotional turmoil and panic attacks took awhile to get over after the field season.
Questions to ask an employer to advocate for yourself:
What procedures or safety measurements do you have in place in an emergency while we’re in the field?
Will there be time to go through protocols, or will we all be trained on what to do so we’re on the same page?
Is funding available for my colleagues and me to obtain, at a bare minimum, CPR/First Aid/AED training?
Are we provided an updated first aid or medical kit? What can or can’t be provided?
Note: Depending on where you work, some cannot carry or provide medicine (Ibuprofen, anti-histamines, etc.) in first kits for legal reasons, so be sure what’s in your kit so you can supplement with ones if needed.
Questions employers should start asking themselves to advocate for better treatment of their employees:
Do my employees have the necessary resources and support to feel safe in the field?
If not, what’s missing, and what can I do?
Did I go through proper protocols, and were they understood? If not, did I hold space for my team members to ask questions to understand it better?
If changes need to be made, can we do so immediately, or will this require a larger system/culture shift?
Am I a part of the problem? <- Ouch, it can be difficult to ask, but start asking it!
I don’t want you to whisper sweet nothings into my ear promising a career filled with health benefits, workers comp, and emotional and physical safety because there’s nothing more dangerous than a false sense of security in this field, and the compensation we get in return is below minimum wage. What I do want is for people in positions of power who are hiring seasonal, temporary employees and interns to have some serious consideration for the safety and well-being of people. It’s easy to write off these asks as being “too much” or to invalidate someone’s concern for their own emotional and physical safety because of what you’d endured “back in the days.” There are many young, eager students that are constantly being churned out who will bend over backwards for our demands to gain real-world experience in this field, but let’s ask ourselves, at what cost?
