A Canadian hostel owner in a Kenyan beach town warned my group we'd start to burn in about 20 minutes under the equatorial sun, then looked directly at me and went "Well. Maybe 15 minutes."

I don't think so! I'd love to hear it, my African fieldwork was on hyenas (and now baboons years later)

You may not remember but like a decade ago I named a hyena cub Digger in your honor and emailed you a photo!

I think that sound more than any other made me go "oh right I'm a monkey with delusions of grandeur"

I've also done a lot of fieldwork in east Africa and let me tell you: if there is any sound that makes you go from fast asleep to the most awake you've ever been in your life, it's a leopard calling outside your tent at 3am

Yeah witnesses told me I got pretty good air clearing the log I was straddling when the one bumped into my foot. In theory you should move slowly and carefully away but instinct goes "learn to levitate RIGHT NOW" and who am I to argue

We leaned heavily on FOMO with college kids. I'd obvs never make anyone hold a snake that didn't want to but often when they saw everyone else taking selfies and having a great time they'd start to feel left out and take the leap themselves. Such a good feeling to help someone brave a new thing!

I've taught a few natural history classes and there are students you have to coax to hold snakes at all, and students you have to convince NOT to grab snakes on sight until they've clocked the species 😅

My favorite squirrel in our population lost an eye in a predator attack and lived two more years, eventually tying the record for the oldest known member of the pop. at seven. You can't get too attached to individual squirrels that get eaten by basically everything but I was attached to her!

My site also got a lot of gopher snakes who try to pretend to be rattlers sometimes. They'll puff up their heads to be more triangular and drum their tails on the ground to mimic the rattle. Unfortunately for them this usually just resulted in me and my field team cooing over how cute they were

Their venom resistance was wild to witness. We'd catch an adult with big swollen puncture wounds and then find it again a few days later running around totally fine. They're impressive little guys!

That is true! The ground squirrels I studied (California ground squirrel) do this, and the adults are pretty immune to venom. The pups are susceptible tho so adults will often mob snakes by kicking sand, tail flagging and biting to drive them away from their burrows.

They evolved a whole mechanism to politely tell Big Animals to back up so they don't have to waste venom on us! What excellent neighbors

I did my PhD on ground squirrels so I spent a lot of time in proximity to rattlesnakes. The number of close encounters I had really proved how much they do NOT want to bite you

Somewhere there is a camera trap photo of me, mid-air with Scooby Doo spinning legs, as I realize my foot is touching one