A day in the life of a wild animal welfare scientist
Photo courtesy of Tom Luhring.
October 24, 2024
Wild Animal Initiative works to accelerate progress in the emerging field of wild animal welfare science. Our mission is largely influenced by the fact that wild animal welfare science is understudied: There are large knowledge gaps about foundational questions in the lives and welfare of wild animals that will only be answered as more scientists enter the field. But we’ve seen significant progress since Wild Animal Initiative was founded five years ago: The number of scientists actively conducting research in the field is growing — including our staff researchers and grantees, but also among the broader academic community.
If you’re a student or early career researcher considering a future in wild animal welfare research, we hope that getting a glimpse into the daily lives of scientists in the field will offer inspiration. Below, several scientists working on projects funded by our Grants Program describe what a typical day of research looks like for them.
Katie LaBarbera
San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, United States
Eighty minutes before sunrise, my alarm goes off. I’m not a morning person, but I have a system — clothes, keys, and glasses laid out the night before — so I can get out of the apartment without giving my brain a chance to reconsider. To get to my field station, I drive on the freeway past the lights of Silicon Valley, buildings labeled Google Cloud and Analog Devices, and billboards advertising chips for autonomous vehicles and dating services for people making more than $300,000. Then, I exit and drive past a semi-permanent tent community to a locked gate, and through the gate towards a sunken meadow bordered by dark trees and filled with silver fog.
My field site is a patch of riparian greenery nestled between an Amazon Warehouse, an In-N-Out, a waste treatment plant, and the San Francisco Bay. Here I meet up with my community science volunteers and, for six hours, everything is birds: safely capturing them, taking measurements, inspecting them while their dark eyes tilt to inspect me back. Birds are full of air, even in their bones, and beneath their feathers their skin is so translucent that I can see purple-red muscle and yellow-red fat. One bird I examine, a bushtit — a fierce-eyed floof weighing less than two pennies — has a crooked lower leg. Looking through our records, I see that we captured her a month ago with a freshly broken leg. Now, the break has healed, imperfect but functional. I add this to the data. Then I set the bird’s feet on my flat palm and lift my other hand, and she flies back to her life.
After fieldwork, what I need is a nap. What I get is a coffee. My cat claims my lap and I balance my laptop on my thighs to answer emails. My volunteers have questions; my collaborator has sent a manuscript draft. A colleague calls to go over budget spreadsheets. I get briefly lost in the city permits website, trying to figure out how to restore the field station’s electrical power.
I pull up my R window and open my notes. Our dataset holds decades of records of birds captured repeatedly, from which I hope to derive an understanding of the impacts of injury on wild birds. I have spent months converting old text notes into analyzable variables, and now I’m constructing my statistical models. In the end, it will just be a few score lines of code, but to get there, I’m sifting through published studies, R package documentation, and years-old StackOverflow answers. My records cover thousands of individual bird lives, and with such a complex dataset, it would be easy to make an analytical error and draw incorrect conclusions. My responsibility is to do this right and find out the truth — and, I eventually remember, to put rice on for dinner.
Learn more about Katie’s research here.
Luiza Figueiredo Passos
Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom
I work as a lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, so my time is divided between teaching and research, and sometimes I can do both simultaneously. I mainly divide my weeks between teaching days and research days. Even if I am not teaching the whole day, I use the rest of my hours to finish teaching-related tasks, so I can entirely focus on my projects on research days.
I currently hold two grants from Wild Animal Initiative. The first grant I’m working on uses acoustics to monitor the welfare of wild birds. For this project, I do fieldwork a few times during the year to deploy and collect my recorders. The field is followed by a lot of time analyzing data on the computer. The advantage of computer-based analysis is that I can select to work from my office, my home or any other location — especially over summer when there’s no teaching.
My second grant involves measuring the welfare of great crested newts with different population densities. This project includes fieldwork during the breeding season, in which I collect environmental and behavioral data, and biological samples requiring laboratory analysis. I run endocrinology and genetic analysis on the days I’m not teaching. The laboratory analysis can take a long time, so I prefer a dedicated day.
Whenever possible, I get students, whether they are under- or postgraduate, involved in my projects so they can help me and also improve their skills. Students can develop their final year dissertation or master’s degree projects by helping me with my research projects. I also have PhD students working on both projects.
I know that being a lecturer does not always sound like a dream career to undergraduates. However, this is a fascinating and fulfilling job in which I can develop projects working with different species and methods, and inspire young researchers to work on animal welfare. I have the chance to travel to different parts of the world for fieldwork and take students on expeditions. Being a lecturer is definitely a very busy job but my days are never the same, and it never gets boring.
Learn more about Luiza’s bioacoustics research here.
Learn more about Luiza’s work on great crested newts here.
Researchers check pond traps for sirens. Photo courtesy of Tom Luhring.
Megan Flanagan, Sydney Falcon, and Jacob Kearns
Wichita State University, Texas State University, and Stephen F. Austin University, United States
We’re graduate students performing fieldwork for a Wild Animal Initiative–funded project. We hope to gain a better understanding of how corticosterone varies across age classes, seasonality, and different populations of lesser sirens. Another aspect of our work is evaluating the impact of two different identification methods on the lesser sirens: PIT tagging and photo recognition.
To avoid the extreme heat, we try to get to our field site by sunrise. Once we get all our supplies unloaded and set up, we put on waders to begin to check our traps. We use fyke nets, minnow traps, and modified trash cans to capture our sirens. We record bycatch as well as any sirens that we capture. For most of the crew, this is the best part of the day, as we often get interesting animals in our traps in addition to our target species. Most notably, we’ve caught mud snakes, cottonmouths, snapping turtles, and even an amphiuma! While traps are being checked, one person on the crew puts the sirens in their containers for waterborne hormone samples. For each siren, three samples are collected.
The first sample establishes the “baseline” corticosterone for that individual. We then gently agitate the siren and take another hormone sample to establish their “stressed” levels. Lastly, we take a sample immediately following the stressed sample to see if they can regulate their corticosterone output and “recover.”
When looking at the identification methods, the protocol changes slightly by replacing the agitation stressor with either a PIT tag or a photo to understand how stressful each of those experiences are for sirens. After all the hormone samples are taken, measurements of each siren are recorded (total length, snout-vent length, mass, etc.) and sirens are returned to the water.
Megan, Sydney, and Jacob are carrying out fieldwork for a project led by Tom Luhring and Caitlin Gabor. Learn more about their research here.
Ruth Feber
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
People often think we need to be concerned about the welfare of wild creatures only if they have fur or feathers. Invertebrates, despite their vast numbers, are rarely considered. The evidence is mounting that this oversight is a mistake. My work is a desk-based exploration of how farmland management might impact the welfare of wild insects, focusing on butterfly caterpillars, and trying to quantify those effects.
There are about 25 species of butterfly that commonly live on UK farmland. These beautiful insects have complex and fascinating adaptations and behaviors, especially in the caterpillar stage. For example, some caterpillars have honey glands, which attract ants that help protect them from predators. Others are cannibalistic, eating nearby eggs to reduce competition for food. They are a lot less mobile than adult butterflies, so are especially vulnerable to welfare impacts from human activities such as farming, as they cannot easily move away.
Photo courtesy of Ruth Feber.
I spend much of my day at the computer. As well as researching the ecology of the caterpillars, I find out about current farming practices and how they might impact caterpillar welfare. For example, what pesticides are used, and are they toxic to butterfly larvae? What might happen to caterpillars when a field is mown for silage or a hedgerow has its annual cut? I investigate where and when the farming activity typically happens, identify points of coincidence with caterpillar activity and assess potential impacts on their health, nutrition, behavior and environment. There is a huge amount of information to be sifted through for some topics, while others are sparsely covered. In the end, a great deal of literature research might be distilled into just one line of numbers in a spreadsheet. It is absorbing work and there is so much to learn!
Luckily, I am not on my own. Collaboration and conversation is a really important part of scientific research, not only with other scientists, but with practitioners and policymakers, helping lead to positive outcomes for welfare. Farmers, insect ecologists and animal welfare experts have all been kind enough to let me pick their brains! This project is a team effort, and I work with a statistical analyst who does the crucial number-crunching. We often meet to discuss the best ways for us to collate and analyze the data.
It is very important to get away from the computer and catch up with my study animals in real life in the field. A daily lunchtime walk keeps me in touch with what is happening in the countryside and how wild insects are faring. Although not a formal part of the project, connecting with nature in this way has many benefits and is a great reminder of why we do this work.
