The Phenological Trap
My PhD began in the Ya Ha Tinda, or ‘Mountain Prairie’ in Stoney Nakoda, named for the extensive natural grasslands that anchor the system. At 30 weeks pregnant, I spent five days with a team conducting vegetation surveys across 70 plots. Afterwards, we celebrated our accomplishments with a 23-mile hike through the backcountry of Banff to recover an elk collar that was sending a mortality signal. That day, thanks to my amazing field partners, I carefully navigated a river crossing and caught sight of my first Banff grizzly bear.
A few months later, I was back in the field. In the sub-zero bite of a Banff February, I joined Parks Canada staff and our winter elk capture team. While my husband looked after our four month old daughter at the YHT Ranch, I was in the field putting collars on elk, doing body condition ultrasounds, and collecting biological samples that would contribute important baselines of my research.
A week after that winter capture, the world stopped. COVID-19 closed the U.S. and Canada border. Suddenly fieldwork and lab work were relocated to my kitchen table, in our home that doubled as a daycare. Because I could not cross back into Alberta, I had to pivot from being a field researcher to a remote project supervisor. I hired and managed a Canadian field technician to keep our ground-truth data flowing.
Eventually the border opened back up, and I returned for short and intense bursts of field work: to deploy camera traps to capture calves at heel, and to work with scat-detection dogs to support research looking at potential competition between feral horses and elk. But the bulk of my fieldwork shifted to the digital landscape.
In all, I spent five and a half years and two pregnancy and postpartum periods mining a 24 year longitudinal dataset that would eventually uncover a phenological trap that no single season could reveal. This journey was the ultimate test of balancing the technical substance of the science with a complex management process and a deep reliance on the relationships that make long-term research possible. I was able to finish this work because I had an advisor who champions mothers in science and a dedicated team of lab mates and partners on the ground who kept the project running when I could not be there. Between my own family and the teachers and caregivers who provided the essential infrastructure of care, I realized that it truly takes a whole village to raise a PhD.