I thought to myself that I'll write a blog post on why I am resigning from my dream job, or what I thought was my dream job.
Instead, I'll write about it instead..the experience, I mean. It'll be cathartic to start recollecting, reminiscing, and hash out the trials and tribulations that went on in the past year and a half of working as a field-based research assistant in wildlife conservation.
It is hard work. Back-breaking, I kid you not. Not just physically but mentally as well. Everyone thinks I'm working with animals and I have such a cool job. They probably think I'm a zoologist working in a zoo, cleaning out cages and feeding the animals (for a couple of years, my dad had been telling everyone I'm a marine biologist).
Far from it.
I've given up my usual mantra of "When I grow up, I want to be Steve Irwin!" Instead, I tell people my work is pretty much like what you see in behind the scenes of National Geographic. Sweaty, muddy, sometimes bloody but no super cool video shots at the end, unfortunately. Just candid pictures of unsuspecting wildlife caught on our remote camera traps. But I did get on tv and the papers- the former as 'background cast' on a wildlife documentary for TV3 showcasing the collaring of elephants and crocodiles by DGFC, and the latter when being interviewed during a ceremony on reclaiming forest/ripariam reserve land from an encroaching oil palm plantation.
Currently, I work not with animals but with people and camera traps.
You'd think I would have been thoroughly familiar with the camera traps since I started working in them with Bronwyn Fancourt for one part of her PhD in 2011-2012. But if I had to compare to Andrew Hearn who has been CT-ing clouded leopards for yonks, I'm still quite a noobie. Although, I can work with them pretty well and if you give me free reign on how and where to set them up, I won't disappoint. Sometimes I feel I have disappointed some of the cameras themselves by putting them up for the sake of putting them up because I have to. So they seek revenge by taking empty pictures (a bazillion pictures of vegetation waving in the hot sun and wind or just nothing at all because ants got into the casings to build a nest and kept triggering the sensor) or just dying and not taking any pictures for absolutely no reason.
Here's the Banteng's album on Danau Girang Facebook page.
Back tracking, let's start from the beginning... What did I really do after graduation?
Graduation was 19 December 2012. I landed in Sabah on 5th January 2013, so that meant a little more than two weeks since donning the Potter robes . For the first five months, I was a volunteer in DGFC, assisting in the various research projects that were ongoing there...not all, just some. Half of them were undergraduates and the other half were doing their PhD/Masters. Some were volunteers, some were on work experience.
Shut up. I know half + half + some + some = >>100%
I 'dabbled' in maintaining the monitoring of the wildlife corridor which was basically checking the cameras which we set up along the riparian reserve, not far from the banks of the Kinabatangan river. Mostly this means scrambling up muddy banks on all fours and end up looking like an elephant.
I assisted in Grace Dibden's project on sunbears where we looked for signs - claw marks on trees mostly, and checking the bear traps which belonged to Roshan Guharajan, a KL-lang doing his Masters in a USA university (I forgot which. *cringe*).
Danica Stark and I attempted to do phenology plots but I was so bad in cutting trails (I actually had no idea what I was supposed to be doing) and she didn't ask me to accompany her anymore. I wasn't much help anyway since I have no clue whatsoever on Bornean flora. If you asked me about Tasmanian flora, I would have made my Plant Science lecturers proud.
Then I went along on some monitor lizard trapping trips with François Ciavatti and Sergio Mendes where blood and scale samples were taken, along with physical measurements.
I've only done one night walk when Priscilla Miard and I were looking for Boss, the resident slow loris and because of my really bad eyesight, I didn't see much.
In between all that, there was the Lahad Datu invasion. I was actually in Kota Kinabalu on a holiday with the kareshi when DGFC was ordered to evacuate.
If you noticed, quite a lot of people at DGFC are foreign and even if we tried to hash out a plan to attract more Malaysians, they don't go further than a discussed thought or an agreement to make a plan. Maybe that's part of the problem other than thinking there's not many of our 'species' to be had to create a population. Us Malaysians who are there aren't together often and the initiative slowly dwindled if kindled at all.
When I first joined, there wasn't a schedule to accommodate the fast expansion of the centre which was becoming busier and more active with more projects and field courses (which was basically a school or university coming in for a few days to a week or two to experience wildlife research). As I made periodic visits back to the centre after I left for BBP in May 2013, there were a lot of improvements and slowly I felt more and more misplaced (more on that some other time) from the new faces and changes.
I joined the Bornean Banteng Programme in May 2013...because there was an opening for research assistant and I was already desperate to get paid (haha)..no. I was actually desperate for something to do than just 'assisting'. All the research that's going on was incredible at first...like hello, such things do exist in Malaysia and despite me not knowing a single thing about the flora and fauna of my own country, I was pretty stoked. Soon, I felt like dead weight. Sure, there was opportunity to further my studies but the life of an academia hadn't appealed to me the two times I was considering the Master's student position on the BBP. I did ponder quite deeply...going as far as downloading and reading journals for a proposal. But after graduation, my brain had decided to take a break from doing anything, really.
The next sentence will be a 'revomitation' of what I've been reiterating to everyone for the past year:
BBP is a statewide project funded by Yayasan Sime Darby (RM1Mil) for three years to locate remnant populations of banteng in Sabah.
When I joined, the BBP was in it's 2nd year, expanding by taking me and two undergraduates (on work experience) on and going statewide after finishing Penny Gardner's PhD fieldwork in Tabin Wildlife Reserve and Malua Forest Reserve. Penny had been based in TWR for the past 3-4 years and after she finished in Tabin, we managed to get a house in the Lahad Datu Wildlife Dept staff quarters sorta for free..we had to clean it up some, deal with cloggy toilet when it rains and low water pressure if someone moves in temporarily next door. The house is barely inhabited so the electricity bill is never above the government subsidised amount of RM20 and the rats and lizards still run rampage, pooing everywhere.
But it was a place, close to civilisation for comfort. Although, sometimes I wish I woke up more often to gibbons and birds instead of the rumble of heavy vehicles and piercing whistle of the traffic police.
I can't fit my work with BBP here. It's way too much and way too much is way too silly for a blog post. So you will have to make do with knowing roughly what I did for the first five months in 2013.
TBH...I lost concentration. My Skrillex playlist just ended. You know how it is.
