Dear all and all dear
I’m an ecologist and on the British Ecologists Facebook page (yup) someone started a ‘you know you’re an ecologist when’ thread, some of which were highly amusing.
My top four from there were, in order:
- ‘After a couple of unexpected surprises, your husband won’t even light the candles on his children’s birthday cakes because (muttered darkly) “you never know what you might find in a matchbox in this house”’
- ‘You’re getting strange looks from a group of hikers as you walk back to your car, oblivious to the fact that the morning’s catch of snails that you thought were safely tucked away in your backpack are now crawling all over your back.’
- ‘You get stopped by the police (doing 35mph just inside a 30mph zone) at 2am and you are not wearing trousers because you fell in a bog during a bat transect.’
- And my favourite, ‘You are involved in a minor-but-serious-enough-to-involve-the-police bump in your car (not your fault!) and you are nervous talking to the police because you really don’t want to have to explain the dead swan on the back seat…’
So I decided to make a little list of my own and put them on here because yep life gets weird.
You know you’re an ecologist when…
- An off-duty police knobhead runs a numberplate checks on your car (apparently) because ‘We’ve had a lot of rural crime round here’ when you’re armed with nothing but a weather writer and a see-through shirt after a downpour. Obviously, very threatening.
- You break your finger hitting it very hard with a large hammer putting up a reptile fence
- You can’t shake hands with a client because you broke your finger hitting it with a hammer when you were putting up a reptile fence… leading to a VERY awkward interaction where the client doesn’t know what to do with his outstretched hand and sort of pats your elbow and then looks horrified with himself
- You get accused of planting bat droppings in someone’s loft to get more business
- You’re on the way to a field site and fall in a ditch
- Your car is FULL of equipment and mud and, frankly, smells
- You’ve worked 8am till midnight and you’re on the same all week
- Strangers ask you ‘what’s in the bucket?’ and you just proffer it towards them rather than say the words ‘Thirteen slow worms’ and just watch their reaction
- You get fourteen ticks in two hours on a bird survey and have to dig them out in the office
- Your freezer is full of creatures to identify later
- You have at least one skull, and probably more than one pot of something very questionable on your desk (personally I have a few owl pellets; my colleagues collect bat shit. They are, quite literally, bat shit crazy.)
- You can not only identify lots of kinds of shit, but get a bit excited about them too. And you don’t even mind if things poop on you. A slow worm pooped on you? Well, that means you caught a slow worm! Congrats!
- You can sniff out dead animals
- Your trousers are covered in literal shit but hell, they don’t need washing, they’ll only get more shit on them tomorrow. They’ll be good till the end of the week.
- Your family text you pictures like ‘Is this a bee? It’s in my garage, what do I do?’ You have become the insect queen.
- Ditto plants. ‘Is this poisonous?’ YES IT IS put it down!!!
- It’s perfectly acceptable to leave a literal shit on your boss’ desk (as long as it isn’t your own)
There’s a lot of shit-related things there isn’t there. Ho hum.
Today I found fox poo, deer poo, hedgehog poo, and shrew poo. Nothing has shit on me for at least a week though, but I did get eight ticks in 45 minutes. I do think this job will kill me.
Au revoir pals
Yours shittily
Georgie
In Other News
I was back home with my parents, my favourite hilarious people. Dad said he’d cut his finger. Mum had a look and it’s a fair decent slice, and she said it looked dirty.
I said “I got a deep one yesterday and it was so dirty I thought I’d wake up to a disgusting infection.”
Dad said, “Have you had your tetanus?”
I said, “Yes, have you?” He said, “Yes, a long time ago!”
“So how did you do yours?” I asked him.
“Oh, well, the fire brigade doctor came round and we queued up and all got the – ”
He didn’t get the rest of it out as me and mum drowned his voice with our laughter.
thoughtsunqualified 