This summer, we asked for your most memorable fieldwork stories, and wow, did you deliver! While you can see the top five finalists here, there were just too many treacherous, heartwarming, and funny entries not to share.

Here, we happily present to you a selection of the funniest tales we received. Get ready to feel good!

One with Nature

By Marcin Winiarek

I was deploying recorders in the largest primeval European forest, the Białowieża Forest. It's a common place for scientists to leave all kinds of devices to capture as much as possible. But in such a miracle of nature, there's one thing you're obliged to do: pee. And I would say that doing so in this beautiful, untouched place is an experience for both body and soul.

The forest offers endless options for where to commit the act: dense bushes, centuries-old trees, enormous fallen trunks, and deep ravines. Naturally, I take the opportunity to commune with nature.

I found a perfect spot: an elderly spruce with a wide trunk and some bushes alongside, so no animals could spy on me (because, after all, that's the most important event in the forest right now). Standing there, surrounded by the hum of ancient trees, birds chirping, and the gentle murmur of a little stream you know from where, I felt strangely connected to everything around me.

As I was about to finish, I looked up to admire the ancient forest one more time and noticed a strangely shaped device across the tree in front of me. Another recorder? I wish. Of course, it had to be one of the camera traps that other researchers had placed to capture wildlife, and of course, it had to be aimed right at me. And let's just say, they certainly captured something they did not expect.

Like a Pro

By Titia Schamhart

While radio-tracking bats at midnight, I triumphantly picked up a strong signal and crept through the bush like a pro, only to discover I’d been zeroing in on my colleague’s headlamp batteries rattling around in their backpack.

I spent 20 minutes stalking a Duracell.

Furry Heist

By Jeff Reed

In Yellowstone, we usually mount our Wildlife Acoustics recorders high up in trees, not for the birds, but for the elk. (Turns out, elk think of recorders as gym equipment and love to whack them with their antlers.) But one day, a grizzly bear decided to show us all who really runs the forest.

This massive bear stood up on its hind legs, carefully reached for the recorder, and, like a safe-cracker in fur, delicately opened the lid. Then, in an act of pure mischief, it dumped out the batteries, but left just enough inside so we could still hear the sound of its crime. With all the finesse of a seasoned burglar, the bear walked away, leaving the unit perfectly intact.

To this day, that same recorder is still out there, working fine. But every time we check its data, we can’t help but imagine the bear chuckling somewhere in the woods, proud of its perfect heist.

Typical Portage Weather

By Caitlin Kollander

“Typical portage weather" is the phrase my peers and I often would use when heading out to Portage Valley, Alaska, to do field work. At the time, I was studying bat ecology using a series of SM4BAT FS recorders, while my fellow student researchers were trapping salmon smolt to document species abundance.

We decided to head out together, a group of three ladies, on one windy, rainy Saturday (Portage is almost always windy and rainy), because safety in numbers is crucial when working in bear country. With bear spray cans strapped to our backpacks and a couple of dogs in tow, we successfully pulled data from the bat recorders and set the salmon smolt traps out to soak for a couple of hours.

With a little time to kill, my friend and I wanted to show our third peer a good time. This was her first outing as an independent student researcher, starting her own research project. We decided we would go hiking while her smolt traps soaked and enjoy some of the hidden hiking trails Portage had to offer.

We bushwhacked through alder shrubs for the better part of a mile, but as tough Alaskan girls, we were hardly deterred by a few scratches to the face if it meant a good hike and gorgeous views. I led us down this trail, well aware my cheaper bear spray can (tucked in the side pocket of my backpack) had a tendency to lose its safety cap when a stray branch pulled it off. I didn't worry much about this, as it had happened many times during previous field outings that year.

As we reached the end of the shrubs and the trail opened, numerous downed trees lay scattered across a boulder field in front of us, making access to the area we wanted to hike challenging but not impossible. Of course, the wind and rain were picking up at this point. As I led us over and around the downed trees and large slippery rocks, we came to a point where it made sense to crawl under a fallen tree leaning on a large boulder.

As I crouched down, the tree scraping against my left side and the boulder rubbing against my right side, I shifted and squeezed through the tight space with my friends close behind me. At that moment, I heard a loud hissing noise. Although I'd never heard this sound in person before, I immediately knew what it was. I yelled, "Get back—RUN!" to my friends, hoping they wouldn't bear the brunt of what had just occurred.

My bear spray, tucked into the right side of my backpack, had scraped against the boulder, pushing the trigger and shooting a blast of highly concentrated capsaicin directly out in front of me. Portage’s windy weather meant that the cloud of pepper spray blew directly back in our faces. I did my best to hold my breath, running across slippery rocks, away from the cloud, like holding my breath would do anything. It didn't.

I was immediately blinded and could not open my eyes, my nose started running, my lungs tightened, and I coughed uncontrollably. It was an immediate and intense burning sensation throughout my entire respiratory system that I do not underestimate would stop any large mammal dead in its tracks. Although I couldn't see anything, I heard my friends coughing and choking, just like me.

Eventually, our sinuses and lungs cleared, and we slowly fumbled over to a small stream to wash our faces and assess the damage. The entire left side of my backpack and right arm were covered in a red, oily solution that would not come off. My friends fared better than I, and thankfully, the dogs missed the experience entirely. After a few minutes sitting by the water and discussing whether we should head back to the vehicles, we decided we were too close to our hike to give up, and we still had enough time to get a good view of the mountains and glacier valley.

I ditched my spicy backpack, and we pushed up the trail, which was not a trail at all, but a talus slope with sliding, sharp shale and large loose rocks that posed quite the hazard to anyone below. We enjoyed a waterfall and a beautiful view of the valley as we hiked higher up the rocks. After a while, one of my friends noticed her dog's paw had been cut on a rock, and she wrapped it up to keep it from getting worse. At that point, we called it quits and hiked back to the parking lot to clean up before checking the fish traps and remaining bat recorder sites.

Wet, cold but sweaty, covered in pepper spray (which was starting to burn intensely on my arm), dog bleeding, and tired from what none of us would have considered a big hike, we were over it. We still managed to finish out the field day and collect all our data without further incident. At home that night, nothing could remove the capsaicin from my skin. It burned for the next 12 hours. It took six passes through the washing machine to get most of the oil out of my backpack.

Looking back on that day, I laugh about it and remember it as one of the “best” worst field days from my time in school. It serves as a good reminder that the experiences we have as researchers are not good based on whether things go right or wrong with the equipment, weather, and wildlife. The quality of the experience is almost entirely determined by the people you work with and the attitudes they bring to the table. A little humor goes a long way when things get rough, and being able to laugh at the things that go wrong, and especially to laugh at yourself when you make mistakes (or accidentally bear spray yourself and your peers), makes for some of the most memorable field adventures.

The Batmobile Incident

By Tammy Caine

A team of us from the wildlife rehab FreeMe Wildlife in South Africa were doing fieldwork surveys on owl and bat populations on a small private reserve as part of ongoing species research for the reserve.
We were using an old version of a bat detector to pick up echolocation calls. One of the calls recorded was that of the Hildebrand's Horseshoe Bat.

When we were back from the field, we ran checks on the echolocation data through another program to exclude incorrect IDs, such as frog calls.

Much to our amusement, the Hildebrand's Horseshoe Bat calls were not correct. The detector had picked up an intermittent "pinging" that, in fact, belonged to my car as we opened and closed the doors!

This reinforced for us the importance of double-checking acoustic data (we really need a better bat detector!) and led to my car being called "Hildebrand" as an ongoing joke.

Every Biologist for Themselves

Fight, Flight, or Use Your Friend as a Springboard

By Colin Sanders

I went to Brazil to conduct my master's research. Initially, I was accompanied by a few colleagues, one of whom has particularly made a name for himself in thermal biology. I went to a facility where, not only was there the species I was going to work with, but many, many more—most predominantly caiman.

There was a particular plant that was common at that facility and around the campus that, unknown to us at the time, heats up its stamen at night to disperse scent and attract pollinators, which clearly intrigued my friend. Even more curiously, only one plant in a particular region per night engages in this activity. This means you just can't walk up to any one of the plants and expect it to be "heating up" at the time you're there. I am gifted with a relatively good sense of smell, and so I joined him in his night searches to pinpoint where the scent was coming from.

One night, we were out looking, and I tracked it to a big plant in one of the caiman pens. I've worked with a number of crocodilians, but my colleague hadn't, and neither of us was thinking that much of the potential danger—just focused on getting some thermal images of this plant.

So, we're marching towards the plant in the dark, and just as we're getting close to it, a large female Spectacled Caiman bursts out of the plant and charges us. In shock, my colleague essentially used me as a prop to gain more traction. (I don't think he meant to do this, and he denies it to this day!) In effect, he grabbed me and threw me at the caiman while he did a 180 and bolted for the pen's wall.

The caiman's rush was a "bluff," more threat than attack, and I was almost rolling on the ground laughing at what my friend had done, with this caiman hissing and growling at us.

Gnaw and Order: Beaver Victims Unit

By Jeremy Gatten

Mic Drop… at Home

By Kim V. Goldsmith

I'm an eco-sound artist. In 2020, I had an opportunity to spend three days in the Great Cumbung Swamp, where the Galari/Lachlan River meets the Murrumbidgee River in southwest New South Wales (NSW). I was with a team of scientists from the NSW government who knew the area intimately.

I packed my kit of sound recording equipment with the intention of getting some dawn chorus recordings on the river and underwater recordings of the carp choking narrow channels in the wetland. (Every soundscape tells a story, right?)

Upon arriving, I discovered not only that I had left behind all the cables to attach my microphones to my audio recorders, but also the hydrophones for the underwater work that everyone was very excited to hear. They were in the same bag, 650km away at home.

My acoustic data logger and underwater camera, equipped with a built-in microphone, had to do the heavy lifting to compensate for the very embarrassing "oopsie." In desperation, I thought I'd try to waterproof a lavalier mic to record the carp writhing in the shallow channels. I cut down a found plastic shopping bag and used lots of duct tape. It worked just long enough to get a recording before killing the mic.

I fumed about this "oopsie" all the way home.