In this week’s installation of our Human Nature series, we explore the ways the natural world challenges our confidence — or, sometimes, rewards it.
Part 1: While working at an off-grid field site in Malaysian Borneo, Kasia Majewski searches for a reticulated python that has gone missing.
Kasia Majewski is a science communicator, environmental biologist, herpetologist, entomologist and general lover of "ologies". Originally from Saskatoon, she has spent the last 6 years working and undertaking research in Vancouver, Japan, Wales, Malaysia, and most recently England, before returning to be with her family in Ottawa mid-pandemic. While she has many animal related stories from her time at Vancouver Aquarium, Science World, the JET Programme, and Manchester Museum, some of the ones that she recalls most fondly are from her masters research in Malaysian Borneo, where she studied the prey associated with Asian water monitor lizards.
Part 2: Edith Gonzalez connects with the less-than-glamorous side of archeology.
Dr. Edith Gonzalez is known to her friends as the Puerto Rican Mr. Spock. She is an historical archaeologist focusing on 18th-century bio-prospecting in the English-speaking Caribbean with four graduate degrees in various sub-fields of anthropology. Dr. Gonzalez has a completely inappropriate obsession with Lord of the Rings and is a two-time Smut Slam champion.
Story Transcripts
Story 1: Kasia Majewski
It's only my second field season ever and I am way out of my comfort zone. I'm sitting in the work track next to one of Saskatchewan's last remaining true cowboys. He's got his cowboy hat on and his oversized belt buckle and we are flying down a washed out dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
Kasia Majewski is a science communicator, environmental biologist, herpetologist, and entomologist.
His name is Andy but I call him boss because he is my boss. And today, Andy is teaching me some tips about how to handle the work truck on difficult road conditions like this.
His number one tip is that when you come up to a patch of washed out road that's all muddy, instead of hitting the brakes to slow down you hit the gas and you hit it hard. And he does, every single time.
And as the mud splashes over the windshield and my stomach turns with fear, he goes, “Yee-haw!” And then he turns to me expectedly until I go, “Yee… Yee-haw!” But I can't do it as convincingly as he can.
I really want to be a yee-haw biologist just like Andy but I don't know how.
Four years later, on the other side of the world, it's 8:00 a.m. and it's already scorching hot. I'm in the middle of Malaysian Borneo at an off-grid field site and it is my very last day. I have just finished my master's research project and that's when Rich, our snake guy, comes up to me to tell me some bad news.
He tells me that one of his animals, a reticulated python that he put a radio transmitting collar on, has now been missing for about ten days. Now, when we collar an animal, that animal becomes our responsibility. The health and well-being of that animal back in the wild is something that matters very much to us. So the fact that we haven't seen this animal for ten days is really troubling.
Rich says he's putting a team of people together to go and look for her and he asks me if I want to come. Now, if I had to describe Rich I would say that even though he swears that his Hogwarts house is Ravenclaw, and he is really well read, everything from his blonde hair to his excessive knowledge of snakes puts him firmly in Slytherin.
Rich says he's also going to ask Coco to come. Now Coco grew up locally on the river next to the field center and he has Borneo in his blood. I mean he regards crocodiles on the river as casually as Canadians regard potholes on the highway.
And on our way out the door, Rich also says he's going to grab Luke, and Luke is an undergraduate student who just arrived the night before. Everything about Luke says that he is not emotionally prepared for whatever is about to happen to him.
We head down to the jetty where the boats are docked. We've got our snake bag. We've got our radio transmitter antennae and the headsets to go along with it. We hop in the boats and we start heading up river.
We pass a couple crocodiles along the way and soon we start hearing this faint ping-ping-ping in the headset that tells us that we're picking up the signal from the collar and we're heading in the right direction towards where the snake was last seen.
Soon we head up to the riverbank, we tie up the boat and I hop out of the boat after the others and follow them up the riverbank. As soon as I'm out of the boat, I'm knee-deep in silty, thick mud and I scan the riverbank quickly for any crocodiles that might be nearby as I'm trying to haul my way up following the others into the elephant grass just past the side of the river.
Now, let me tell you something about elephant grass. I hate elephant grass. It gets its name from being tall enough to hide the elephants that frequent the sides of the river but it also has these serrated edges on the leaves so when I pull out my machete to hack my way through it, it hacks me back and covers my hands and arms and face in a thousand little bloody cuts.
We get to this really thick patch of elephant grass and we make a plan to surround it in a circle and start cutting our way through it to the middle. We figure that this looks like a good spot for the snake to be hiding.
When the others leave me and I start cutting my way through, I can't shake this horrible feeling that I'm about to stumble on something terrible.
It's my very last day in Borneo and all I want is a happy ending to this story. I want to bring home a happy ending to this story, but I know what's at risk here. I know that I can be cutting my way through to find either a dropped collar or an injured snake or, worse, a dead snake, and that's really not what I want to find.
But as I reach the center of the patch of elephant grass, I catch sight of the others hacking their way through and my heart sinks even more because I realize that they all look confused. And that tells me one thing, that none of us have found a spot for a snake to hide, or at least a spot for this snake to hide because this snake is four meters long and about 45 kilograms. That's a lot of snake to hide.
We collapse down into the mud among the cut-down elephant grass and we grab our water to grab a quick drink. That's when Rich says the words that I really don't want to hear. He says, “We've been here long enough. We've been making a lot of noise. We're probably attracting the crocodiles. It's time for us to head back.”
And I trust Rich completely. He runs his project with precision. It's just that the last few years, this little voice has been building confidence inside of me with every passing year of biological fieldwork experience. Right now, this little voice is telling me that there's something else here that we don't see, and maybe if we give it another minute maybe we can find what we're missing.
And that's what makes me turn to Rich and say, “Maybe we should listen to the radio transmitting device just one more time. Maybe it'll give us a clue.”
Exasperated, Rich grabs the radio transmitter headset and he turns up the volume so all of us can hear. It's a loud clear ping-ping-ping. That is telling us that this animal and the collar that that's on it is somewhere nearby somehow.
That's when, with the confidence of someone who has been around deadly animals his whole life, Coco looks at us and says, “Oh, maybe…” and then he plunges his whole arm right into the mud, right in the middle of our circle, past his elbow. And then he looks at us with only a hint of surprise and says, “Oh, snake.”
And then everything happens in triple time. Luke leaps out of the mud like he's fired off an escape hatch. Me and Rich thrust our arms into the mud next to Coco’s and, sure enough, there we feel it, the coils and the scales of our snake.
None of us had ever read a publication that described this kind of behavior in reticulated python before. We didn't know that they could burrow in the muck like that. But now suddenly it all made sense. She was right there. We were sitting on her.
Now, reticulated pythons are one of the biggest predatory species in all of Borneo so, thankfully, this snake remained relatively calm as we started pulling her out of the muck. I think she just couldn't believe that anything could be big enough or stupid enough to want to pull her out of the mud, but we did.
One coil and then a second coil and then a third coil, and the whole time we're pulling her out Luke is kind of dancing around us panicked and saying fragments of questions like he's trying to figure out how he can help us.
But none of us can tell him what to do because we are winging it. Everything I'm doing in that moment is based on years of previous experience. I don't know what to tell Luke because I don't know what's going to happen next. I just feel like it's all going according to plan.
But that's when we realize we've pulled out several meters of snake by the middle and two ends still remain in the mud, but we don't know which end is which. This is not a problem you want to have with reticulated pythons. In biology the general convention is that one end of a snake is much more bitey than the other end.
I look at Rich and Coco and I gesture towards my end and I say, “This end. Let's start with this end first.” And I base this on literally nothing other than a gut feeling.
We start pulling her out, wrestling the few meters we already have on the ground and I am nearly level with this animal in the mud. I have no idea if I'm ready to face whatever is about to come out of the mud next but I keep pulling inch by inch.
And then out she comes. And with a resounding squelch, she shits all over us. And we cheer. In biology, another generally accepted convention is that being pooped on is considerably better than having parts of you bitten off.
Rich is cackling. Coco is surprisingly stoic but probably thrilled. Luke is jibbering away nervously and I am excited because I have my happy ending.
With the whole body under our control, we're able to safely remove the head from the mud. We place her in a snake bag, tie up the top and transport her back to the boat. We go back to the field center, we give her a full health evaluation and she passes it with flying colors. She's absolutely fine. We release her the next day.
Now, I don't know what the official certification ceremony is for becoming a yee-haw biologist, but that day in the mud getting shit on by a python certainly felt like it was it.
Story 2: Edith Gonzalez
It all started with the duck. I was in my PhD program at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and I lived in this big sort of brick Victorian house in a room that used to be a sun porch at the back. So it had these big windows that faced a little wooded area that had a little cabin. And there was another graduate student who lived back there, but I never saw her. I only ever saw her car parked at the side of the house. But I didn't have any curtains on it because I just faced a wooded area. There was no reason for it. And I was startled because my friend Erik had come and was banging on the window in the backyard. So I went out and he handed me this newspaper-wrapped parcel, which, when I unwrapped it, was a duck, a dead duck. And he said, "Can you cook it?" And I was known for being a pretty good cook. So I was like, "Yeah, sure." I didn't have any problem. I'll cook the duck. So I took the duck and I was like, OK, I've never had to cook a duck that had like had feet, feathers, blah, blah, blah. So I just got a big knife from the kitchen and sat on the old wooden back porch and took off its head and its feet and its entrails and everything, and then tried to pluck it, which was highly unsuccessful.
So I ended up sort of doing a bad job of skinning it. And then I ended up cooking it with a lovely apricot sauce and couscous and it turned out quite well. But, you know, in the back there, I had to go clean it up and there was just sort of gore, some gore everywhere, wrapped up in the newspaper, and I had to sort of shimmy down the side of the house to the trash bins, trying very hard not to leave bloody handprints on the back neighbor's car and pitch out the remains. And so it all turned out well.
But when I was cleaning up after dinner, I realized that I had these duck bones and I was there, I was at the University of Virginia to study archaeology and actually what some people might call historical anthropology. I was there working with an archaeologist, pretty famous archaeologist who sort of defined my field. And it was a little intimidating. He was a really nice and approachable person, but definitely intimidating to be working with him. And so I had this idea that I would save these bones and kind of bring them as a gift to the archaeology lab who was in the middle of creating a comparative collection. Now, a comparative collection can be of different types of artifacts that you would find if you were excavating, so that if you find little pieces of something on an archaeological excavation, you can bring them back to your lab and match them up to sort of the whole item to kind of figure out what the heck you have.
And one of those classes of artifacts are bones. And so at the lab, they definitely had some comparative domesticated animal bones because a lot of the archaeology that we were doing for the historic time period had to do with the plantations and other kinds of big farming agricultural estates that they had had in Virginia. So they had a lot of domesticated animals that you would find on a farm. But here was a wild duck. So I was like, "OK, this is cool." So I bring it in and I show it to my professor and he's like, "Oh, this is great." Like, he was very pleased to have the duck as part of this collection. And I was still sort of, like I said, like a little shy around him, and he said, "Well, you know, I have a great idea for you, for your term project for the semester. Why don't you collect wild food source animal bones? Like, why don't you collect stuff from the local area? Because we do come across that. And that'll give us some interesting information about the diet of people in the past."
And I was all very kind of gung ho about this. I was like, "Yeah, OK, sure!" Because, like, I basically would have said yes to anything he suggested as far as like what I should do for my research. But I was really there to study the lives of people who were enslaved during the historic time period. And so I was sort of like, OK, sure, not really on topic with what I want to do, but it'll be important. It'll help the lab. It'll help everybody. Like, yeah, OK, I'll do it. So I go home and I call my friend Erik. I was like, "Hey, Erik, where'd you get the duck?" And he said, "I hit it with my car." So basically, yes, we were eating roadkill. And so I was like, OK, fine, well, I need to find a way to get more wild animal food sources. So I was like, OK, sure. So he was like, all right. So I began to collect from different people these wild animal food sources, a.k.a. roadkill. And I had for that semester, I was like, oh, God, what am I doing? And so, like I said, I just want things that people could possibly have eaten. So it started off with a couple of squirrels. Now, the thing about bringing bones into a collection is you have to clean all of the gory bits and flesh off them.
So people began to bring me smaller things like squirrels and possums, and I would go out into the backyard and just try and de-flesh them. The first time I did this. I ended up with these little articulated gory squirrel skeletons, and I just put them in a bin of bran because that's what you do and you let the flies get to them and the maggots eat the dead flesh and it cleans them up really quickly.
But the first time I did this, I de-flesh some squirrels and again, skinnying around the girl's car to not cover it with blood and gore when I threw out the remains, that gory stuff. I put in the bran, and in the middle of the night, just the sound of the raccoons tearing it to shreds just really was a little disturbing. And in the morning, it looked like a crime scene with little bodies, their limbs outstretched and flung where two raccoons were fighting over them. And I also realized quickly not to do this on the back porch because scrubbing blood out of wooden floorboards is really difficult. And I began, as the semester progressed, to process more and more of these animals. And I realized certain things like it makes more sense to take the little remains and put them into a little wire cage and bury the cage so that you don't lose any of the little phalanges or other little bones from the extremities as they're de-fleshed by the natural elements.
Things progress with various birds and animals throughout the semester, and I realize -- at some point, I start to get really sort of angry because I'm getting this reputation around town as the roadkill girl. Like people are dropping me off roadkill on my back porch all the time, and I'm like, how did this happen? Here I am this kind of loudmouth Puerto Rican girl from Queens, and I find myself in Charlottesville, Virginia, working with basically my intellectual idol to study the ancestors. I'm here because I want to really do work that's important to me, that's important to my family and thinking about how can I give voice to people and understand people's lived experience that doesn't normally make it into the historical record. But instead what I'm doing is digging holes in my backyard that, if my landlord ever saw, he would freak out and chopping up roadkill and burying it. And all I can do is like when I'm out there hacking things apart, I look up into my bedroom and I see my beautiful altar, my Santería altar with my candles and my saints.
And I'm saying my prayer like, "How did I end up here?" I asked my ancestors, "How did I end up here?" I shouldn't be burying things. I should be excavating. And so one day I come home and someone has said to me, "Hey, I got you this goat." Now I know I'm not supposed to be de-fleshing domesticated animals. But we didn't have a goat in the comparative collection.
So I take this goat and it's like a Tuesday or something, and I dump it into this big cooler that I have and I put ice on it and I shoved under the back porch and I sort of forget about it until about Saturday when I can deal with it. And I go back there and I'm like, goats don't smell so good to begin with. But in this particular case, they smell worse after being dead for a while and then spending a week inside a cooler with melted ice. So I sort of dump it out and I take this big black plastic bag that it was wrapped in. And I have a tarp. And by this time I sort of have a system. You know, I realize that you can't really wear gloves to do this. It's better to just get filthy and gross and then hose yourself down. And that, having it been dead for a while, it'll be easier to get its skin off.
But it's kind of a big animal. So I've laid out my butcher knives and dissection kit, and I have sort of built a little cage for it so I can bury it. And I'm back there and that Silence of the Lambs really works. I've put Vicks under my nose and wrapped my face in a in a bandana, as we did prior to,haha, prior to the pandemic, my strategy. So I'm out there and I'm just really getting my hands under this skin. You know, you make this long incision and you basically peel its skin off like you're taking a jacket off. It comes off, turns the sleeves inside out, and I'm hacking away at it. And I'm really, again, like questioning my life choices. And how the hell did I find myself here? Because when people ask me, "Hey, what are you doing your PhD in?" I kind of... It's not an easy answer. I never just say like, oh yeah. Usually I fumble and just say, "Yeah, I'm studying archaeology," and they're like, "Oh, like dinosaurs!" No, that's paleontology. Or like, "Oh Indiana Jones!" Or I say I am a historical anthropologist studying slavery. And they're like, "Yeah, well how did you end up being roadkill girl?"
So I'm sitting there like trying to get the skin off of this goat, lost in thought, when I hear behind me [GASP!]. And I realize it's the girl that lives in the cabin behind my house. And I whirl around and I'm holding this big knife and my face is covered and I am gore from, you know -- gore to the eyebrows. And her eyes -- I have never seen this in real life. Like in a cartoon where someone's eyes, like, bug out of their head and then snap back in, her eyes are so big that it looks like they're just going to pop right out of her head. And I look around and I see her look from like my face to my hands to the carcass that I've just thrown a tarp over. So she can't quite see what it is. But you can see that it's big. And then she looks around the yard and I realize that she can see what basically looks like an open grave, materials for building a cage, and then if you look up to my room, you can see my Santería altar.
And then I turn around and look at her and I realize she thinks I'm a serial killer. So I said, "It's OK, it's OK!" And she's still looking, like, frozen, like should she flee or call the police? And I said, "It's OK. I'm an archaeologist."