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 4th 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.
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