Electric fences DO shock you

So my thesis field work has become quite the adventure. Basically every site I go to has a fence I have to get through. All are electric to keep the cows in and then some add barbed wire to that. I have mastered getting past fences…kind of. The other day I was trying to be very quite getting through the fence because there were cows in the distance. I don’t care what people say, cows are f-ing scary. So if the cows see me, I turn around and don’t set traps up at that site. Anyway, I was getting through the electric and barbed wire fence when I lost my balance and my lower back landed on the electric fence. Of course it shocked me and I screamed which made the cows be aware of my existence. All that work and pain to get over the fence and I had to go right back through it because the cows were coming. Ugh. Some pastures are wetter than others. A few times I have gotten a boot stuck in the mud and my foot has pulled fully out of the boot. I then have to balance on one foot while I try to pry the boot out of the mud. I have been lucky not to fall into the mud…yet. When I am not being chased by cows or electrocuted, I am falling because the ground is covered with rocks and roots. I was setting traps in a forest and I got lost for about a half hour before I found the car. My heart was racing. I knew I was going to be ok because I had a gps, but I was still freaking out that I was never going to get out of there. I was parking on the side of a dirt road and I didn’t see that there was a small ditch. I got the car stuck in it. I had to walk 2 km to the nearest houe and bother the cutest Swedish couple on their holiday to help me. Thank god the dude was a car guy. They pulled my car out with a rope. They were really nice. When I go back to take the traps down I am going to bring them a present for saving my life. Another encouter happened today when I got a flat tire. My first flat tire. I looked for the car manual to find directions on how to change a tire and I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I googled “how to change a tire.” I was in the process of lifting the car with the jack in the pouring rain when a guy pulled over to help me. He didn’t speak English so I had to speak in Swedish. It was awesome. I am confident that I can survive on Swedish now. He was a pro at changing the tire. I have been very lucky to not have these problem out in the middle of nowhere, where some of my sites are. I have been seeing a lot of wild life. Deer, rabbits, a weasel, and a muskrat looking thing. I have a good time doing my thesis, but it is a lot of hours driving and being out. I am trying to get all the traps up as fast as possible so I have been pulling 10-12 hour days. I think I have 3-4 days left and then I will be able to chill for about 2 weeks before I have to go back out and take the traps down. Enough of thesis stories. Our apartment threw a 4^th of July party and it rocked. There were like 12 of us and we had a nice bbq paired with American drinking games and American song singing. We made s’mores for the Swedes. They liked them. We had sparklers too. It doesn’t get pitch black here ever  in the summer and the darkest point in the night is at like midnight so we did the sparklers in the light. But they were still awesome. We ran out of beer so I had to keep the party going. I chose to get everyone to play Catch Phrase. It became so intense. It is really fun to play with people who don’t speak English as their first language because the way they try to explain words can be quite funny. I took a day off from thesis the other day to chill and went to Berg which is like 15 minutes away from Linkoping. There is a small beach by a lock in a canal. It was really nice. The other relax time I spend watching Games of Thrones (which is awesome). That is all for now. I am going to go be so Swedish and eat some salmon and potatoes. Peace and Love.

Sommar i Sverige

So my master’s thesis (graduate project) has begun. I have been planning and doing some things since March, but now the fieldwork is here. For some reason, I choose projects that involve me having to do nightly tick checks. Good thing I brought my “tick removing” tweezers with me to Sweden. I have removed 4 ticks so far I think. Here is a quick explanation of what I’m doing. Old oaks in Sweden are host plants to many species. One species is the yellow-legged clearwing moth. Due to humans, oaks have been declining and thus the species dependent on oaks have been affected. The aim of my project is to determine how many oaks and at what scale provide a suitable habitat for the moth. This information can be used to create conservation plans and so on. This involves driving around the region setting up sex pheromone traps to get occurrence data of the moth. Then, I will relate that data to oak density data and find for a certain density of oaks that explains the moths occurrence. Enough of the boring stuff. The fun stuff is having absolutely no life while doing this fieldwork. I now understand what everyone in grad school meant about having no other life. I train in the mornings and then go out all day to random sites in Östergötland. I get home around 11pm and then do it all over again the next day. I’m basically living out of a car. I am renting a car from the university. I have about 120 sites to visit for my project. I aim for setting up 15-20 traps a day. So optimistically it should take me 6-8 days to set up all the traps. Then later on this summer I will go back out and take the traps down. Cows scare the shit out of me. I have never been around them before and they are a lot bigger than I thought. I have to walk in pastures at a lot of my sites and some of them have cows. The first time was scary. About 8 cows approached me while I was hanging traps in a tree. As I started walking back to the car they started to follow me. One cow in particular was not very fond of me. I think she was the mom and her calf was around so she was being very protective. She would start to charge at me but I would hold my hand out and yell NEJ! and she would stop. The moment she first began to charge at me I legit thought I was going to die. I carry a small knife on me, but that wouldn’t do much to a momma cow protective of her young. I slowly backwards walked about 200 m keeping an eye on the angry cow. She kept attempting to charge at me but she would then get scared once she got about 3 m away (yes, I use the metric system now). Once I was about 20 m from the barbed wire fence, I turned around and booked it. The cow followed. I ripped my shirt and pants on the barbed wire fence trying to get through it as fast as possible. I laid on the ground on the other side of the fence for a couple minutes because my heart was beating so fast. F-ing cows man. Another funny story was when I was putting traps up near a persons property. A woman came out and was curious about what I was doing. I explained to her and she asked me if I would like to take a break and have a “fika” with her. SO Swedish haha. Anyway, on top of my project I am helping a group from a different university in Skåne, (SLU) put up sex pheromone traps for other insect species around the region. Since I am helping them now, they will help me with my project later on this summer. So a lot of fieldwork needs to be done this summer, but it will keep me busy. 

I am happy to be staying here over the summer. It does rain a lot though. At the moment I don’t have time to work, but maybe when I have a break from my fieldwork I will get some work at the warehouse. Deb and I are going to have a 4^th of July party on Wednesday. A little BBQ action. Show the Swedes what Independence is all about. Fireworks aren’t sold here except around Christmas and New Years so we will have to find other things to light on fire. We bought marshmallows but graham crackers and herseys chocolate are not available here so we wont be able to do s’mores. Sad. I have been spreading beer pong and other solo cup drinking games around my Swedish friends. They love it. Mandy brought me a wiffle ball bat back from American in the spring, but my dizzy bat fun was very short lived. Midsommar is a holiday here where people celebrate the summer with drinking, eating, singing, and dancing. It was last week and I celebrated it with my dizzy bat. Somehow the dizzy bat didn’t make it home with me and is lost somewhere in Linköping. Bummer. Hope everyone's summer is going well. Miss you all.