Let me start with saying I am pretty sure I did not reply to this conversation the way I think I am supposed to reply, so forgive me for any resulting mishaps. I have been reading this topic on the loss of field-based courses with great interest and have collected some of my thoughts. It is an abhorrent reality that field-based courses are disappearing. Unfortunately, the reality I see is that it is the fault of the scientists, and the general public (let's not go there!), that field-based courses are dwindling. This is a trophic cascade of economy rather than ecology. There are hardly more than a handful of jobs available that are field-based jobs. Therefore, the need for field-based coursework has dropped. This is only my second time posting to this listserv and if you remember my first post on the horrendous sub-poverty pay for degree-holding biologists, you might recall I have strong opinions. Many of the posters, whose emails included signatures with job titles, are creating this cycle. Professors, you are part of the problem. Colleges/universities are the primary source of post-graduation employment for a biologist that wants to avoid day after day under fluorescent lighting and even then most of the year really is spent indoors with a few months getting down and dirty. Even then you need to be in school 21-23 years (what you didn't think K-12 was going to school?) of your life to get a professorship. There are only a few rare cases, that I am aware of, of professors without a doctoral degree. Going back to the undegrad years, there are no skills taught in universities, just information that has been disseminated. The only reliable source of wildlife management jobs are through governmental organizations, both state and federal. The problem is, they want biologists (who remember aren't going outdoors anymore) who know how to use farming equipment like road graders, backhoes, mowers, etc. Except for those schools that wisely distinguish between Wildlife Science and Biology in their degree titles, nobody is teaching kids how to operate heavy machinery. What your left with are "biological technicians" that grew up on the family farm that do not necessarily know why they are doing what they are doing. I have seen this firsthand where there is one lead biologist directing a team of under-educated, rural-grown individuals to mow, plow, plant, burn, etc. That leaves one biology job per 3-10 "biological technicians" that have no background in biology. That is not a good ratio for graduating biology students that want a career in wildlife management. I have been in the position where I, the underpaid technician, had to teach my supervising graduate student how to perform radio telemetry. That same person, who was brought on to pay more attention to the vegetation than the birds being studied, held in his hands a perfect example of poison ivy up to his face and asked "what's this plant with three leaves?". I have worked for an individual M.S. student that had taken one third the number of science courses that I had, but his distinguished school got him success after undergrad. Another time I worked with a university professor that identified a pair of King Rails, our study organism, as a pair of Mallards. Again and again these are the type of inexperienced, field-virgins being given Master's degrees and career positions in wildlife biology. Why? Because they had a high GPA or went to a noteworthy school. Does that make them good field biologists?
What makes this even worse, and I believe I harped on it in the past, is that every state and governmental organization looking to hire for career positions are requiring a Master's degree or more and several years of full-time permanent experience. All the career biology positions that pay a decent salary have this conundrum of wanting you to have a lifetime of experience with a lifetime yet to live. What world are they living in? What makes it harder for someone like myself is that I cannot put my years of experience in the field getting to know the flora and fauna in their natural setting as a resume point. If I wasn't supervised, I wasn't there is the mindset of resume readers. Another sad reality is that there are functionally zero entry-level biology positions. Everything out there is seasonal, temporary, OPS, internship or volunteer. Economically, this is great for all those state and federal organizations to not pay employees year-round. For the employee this means every 3-6 months you are thrown back out into the street without a place to live (because remember these positions usually require living on-site in remote areas), only pennies in their pockets (because remember these part-time paying, double-time working positions pay less than the poverty line) and they still can't claim to have had a year of full-time permanent experience for their next seasonal employer to find on their resume. If you check out Job Board | Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences Job Board throughout the year for positions that are hiring for bird-banding, anything with mammals or anything outside the U.S. the LARGE majority will be volunteer or pay-to-work opportunities with no travel reimbursement. Last year, after my long rant on this listerv about low-paying wages, I received international applause for speaking out. Incredibly, one of the people patting me on the back for speaking out against unfair wages and over-requirements was the same woman who denied my overqualified resume for a $1600/month seasonal position! So wildlife biologists are stuck in this ironic cycle of having very few career level positions that require years of experience but there are functionally zero entry-level jobs for someone to gain the needed experience for a meaningful (and I stress meaningful) period of time. When they do finally get an entry-level, probably seasonal, position they have to flirt with the idea of holding food stamps in one hand and their degree in the other. Is that the future we want for wildlife biologists? When an undergrad finally gets their bachelors degree and enters the real world of holding down a job they are forced into desperate situations. Do I want to support myself or do I want to help the world while doing what I love? Too often it is one or the other because we have not supplied field-based jobs and certainly have not supplied fair wages for entry-level field-based positions. Another problem I see in plain sight is the dying interest of field-based studies, especially habitat management. If what I have said is true and a substantial portion of post-graduate jobs are in university-led research, then a substantial portion of wildlife biology has stopped research on WILDlife biology. The field is developing and progressing in the lab-based research sense but not nearly as much in the application of that knowledge. The real exception that comes to mind is in fire-dependent communities. We love to burn and watch stuff grow back. But the management, or mismanagement in my opinion of NWRs, side of wildlife biology is not supplying many jobs. Instead, the human focus is on lab-based approaches where we eliminate reality (variables) to find out what might happen. This is like a joke I heard on the TV show Big Bang Theory where the punchline (in non-comedic paraphrasing) was that most physics experiments don't actually work outside of a vacuum. The same is true for our laboratory-based research with their fruit flies, zebra finches and African Clawed Frogs. In my opinion, one of the worst crimes we have committed in the field of biology, is the focus on phylogenetics. At the end of the day this is useless information. It cannot be applied to save a species, a community or a habitat. It cannot feed our families. When we have figured out the evolutionary relationships of every single organism on the planet, that is all we will have done. There are no management strategies for knowing paraphyly, monophyly or sister taxa. Nobody wanted to rescue the Osprey from DDT because it was the Bald Eagle's close relative. Heck, most people still think they are a hawk. I have even seen National Wildlife Refuges label them as such on educational displays and bird checklists. What will we get from knowing everything about phylogeny? We can finally tell intelligent design believers that humans really did come from monkeys or that life really did start in the sea instead of on land (which is stated in Genesis). We're going to spend billions of dollars and thousands of careers so we can trump the age-old battle of fact versus faith. Most of the planet still won't believe us. Even if we do convert the world to believing in evolution and an earth-based origin of life, all we will have left of it are some diagrams to show. Sadly, because biologists ignored ecology and focused on phylogeny, most of those trees will have crosses to indicate we let 99% of living things go extinct just so we could know where they came from. Congratulations. Maybe Malcolm McCallum and I are the only two people interested in wildlife biology that had to support themselves through school and didn't have parents that could send us to pay to work in the tropics or work with a certain taxa. But I don't think that's true. What I think is the truth is that once so many of you finally got your jobs that gave you stability and took financial stress off your back, you forgot all about the struggle. You forgot others were doing the same thing or you assumed the next generation would grow up wealthy. I am hear to tell you otherwise. Isn't it sad that in the same ECOLOG digest email as the loss of field-based courses there is an email asking for volunteers to come do important work in the tropics? Is there something YOU can do about that? If you can answer yes, do something about it. Robert Gundy B.Sc. in Biology, Florida State University Unemployed Cause you didn't hire me And cause I don't have a Master's degree And cause I can't afford to volunteer or pay to work And cause there are a loss of field-based courses and jobs But I'm still here because I love wildlife biology Job Board | Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences Job Board Assistant/Associate Professor: Louisiana View on wfscjobs.tamu.edu Preview by Yahoo
