NOTED
in the FIELD In a land of snakes and ticks, there’s an unexpected danger photos and words by MURRY BURGESS
I
startled myself when I realized I was reaching for a large ball of scales instead of the tiny bundles of feathers I’d been expecting. The rat snake was curled up in the chicks’ nest, its body spilling over the sides. It seemed to be resting peacefully after eating my research subjects. I climbed up my 20-foot ladder, wrestled the rat snake down, and transported it a bit up the road hoping it wouldn’t return. (It did, again and again.) Then I got back to work. Every day that I do research, I double-check that I have all my safety equipment. I pack bug spray, a first-aid kit, extra water, and, at the insistence of my mom, sunscreen. I triple-check that I pack my knife, wallet, and ID. I load these supplies, plus my 3-year-old pitbull mix, into the car.
46 | WALTER
I am a Ph.D. student studying urban ecology and ornithology in the Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation program at North Carolina State University. For my research, I have been conducting a field experiment in rural Snow Camp, testing how Barn Swallow chicks respond to artificial light at night during their development. The experiment takes place inside an old wooden barn with LED Christmas lights hung over the nests as my anthropogenic light source. As a first-year graduate student, I waited in my college’s safety seminar for the topic of confrontations with others to come up. We discussed basic first aid and venomous snake identification. We were taught how to safely remove ticks and monitor bites for disease. All the example photos showed the symptoms on white
skin. “What do we do if we work in urban neighborhoods and men start harassing us?” asked one of my Black female colleagues. “Just call the police,” said the professor. But to us, the solution felt just as dangerous as the problem: in an era where headlines are filled with Black people killed by police during routine stops, calling the police feels like inviting more serious issues. We’d rather put up with the catcalls than turn someone into another hashtag, or worse, become one ourselves. Most of my field career has been tinged with racism, beginning before my research even started. I was looking for field lodging in Snow Camp so I wouldn’t have to commute an hour to the barn every day. There’s a campsite adjacent to the barn that was an ideal place to live for the
