The Phenological Trap
My PhD began in the alpine meadows of the Ya Ha Tinda. 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 pals, I carefully navigated a river crossing and safely 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 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.