Slap. Ouch. I’ve just been thwacked in the face by bamboo. Again. I’m on all fours, crawling through a rather dense thicket of bamboo. It’s around me, it’s above me, and its also really rather itchy. You are probably questioning what exactly I am doing; I know I certainly am. The answer is…fieldwork.

Aside from getting stuck in complex…

It's best not talk to British academics about their job satisfaction at the moment; if you're lucky they will sigh and roll their eyes at you, if unlucky they will explain exactly how stressed and unhappy they are, what with preparing for the government's Research Excellence Framework, grant funding being more and more difficult to get, the exam season, a study, which shows that only 12% of…

People (I’m as guilty as anyone) can be annoying, frustrating, even infuriating. I think for many of us in conservation, it’s one of the reasons we value our work as much as we do. We spend countless joyous hours alone observing or tracking wildlife out on the remote edges, blissfully free of people.

However, I think this desire to avoid people and the challenges they may pose leads to…

A recent study published in Nature traced commodity production induced species loss back to over-consumption in major economies such as the US, EU, China and Japan. A similar exercise could be carried out for the threat to species resulting from mineral and fossil fuel extraction. In both these cases, the main enablers of consumption are giant multi-national corporations and their extensive…

The ICCS group works across the world on a dizzying breadth of projects but to my mind there is one theme that links them all, social situations are complicated and your actions often have unintended consequences. This sounds like a bit of a platitude and maybe it is, but I think just the strength of that as a theme tells us a lot. If all the members of a large lab are spending their waking…

I know we have had a few recent blogs about lessons from the field, but I thought I would add my two cents worth too. Also, who doesn’t love reading about other people’s experiences in the field?

I have been carrying out my PhD fieldwork in Uganda since the beginning of September, working on the Darwin ‘No Net Loss’ project. As part of my fieldwork, I have been conducting household…