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The Field Herpetologist’s Guide to Interior Australia … with Kids
Arid Australia is a paradise for herpetologists studying lizards and snakes. While this statement is objectively true no matter who says it, I also recognize that I have some bias here. I was born and raised in the southwestern United States, which is almost entirely arid desert
in some form or another. Even though I live in Michigan now, it perhaps will not surprise you to learn that I think that the desert is the most fabulous habitat on Earth and that desert squamates are the absolute pinnacle of evolution. So, this is a story about my field expeditions with my herpetologist husband, Dan Rabosky, to the deserts of Western Australia in 2013 and 2015. We logged more than 13,000 km across some of the most remote places on Earth, found incredible reptiles and amphibians (and a healthy dose of bizarre mammals), and saw breathtaking landscapes.
However, this story comes with a twist. This is also a story about balancing life
with my career as a herpetologist—as part of a dual academic couple who also had dreams of starting a family. My first few years as faculty at the University of Michigan (UM) in some ways feel defined by the significant convergence of (1) being in the declining fertility decade
of my 30s, and (2) living my normal life as a scientist. This intersectionality is certainly not mine alone, but it does center some nonscience content that is less commonly talked about. So, this essay pairs its herpetology with an uncomfortably honest—but hopefully humorous—account of how that intersection manifested for me as both a woman and herpetologist who tried (imperfectly) to do it all,
with some lessons I learned along the way.
The first field expedition Dan and I wanted to run after joining the faculty at UM in 2012 was to Western Australia, targeting primarily skinks. We envisioned running a transect across the top half of the state, with four to five stops for installing traplines and sampling the lizard community as completely as possible. Remote areas in Australia are surprisingly difficult to sample simply because there are so few roads. Most of the interior deserts are not accessible except by helicopter, and you can be out there for weeks and see very few other people. It’s that sheer wilderness—and one so full of reptiles—that motivates many of us to do fieldwork there.
Fast forward to 31 March 2013, 4 days after we arrived in Perth and exactly 30 days after I’d taken my last birth control pill. I woke up at 4 a.m., still adjusting to the 12-hour time difference, but also feeling decidedly weird
beyond that. Even though it was too early in the morning for proper mental functionality (we are not ornithologists, after all!), there seemed only one way to quiet that small voice saying that there was something going on beyond jetlag … take a pregnancy test.
That test does not look positive,
Dan insisted, groggily, after I shook him awake. Here, let me take another one as an experimental control!
he said, disappearing down the hall with a second unused test.
Would you like to guess how that exercise turned out?
Principle 1: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance
As I sat on the bed simultaneously staring down both the positive test and the nine weeks of incredibly remote fieldwork in front of me, my thoughts raced down two separate tracks. First, I thought of my former doctoral advisor, Barry Sinervo, and everything he had tried to teach me about successful fieldwork. His saying that I loved the best was the 6Ps,
rumored to have originated with the British military: Proper prior planning prevents poor performance. When you are headed into international fieldwork that costs thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to organize, it is absolutely critical that you plan ahead, and that you do it well. You must be prepared to deal with anything and everything that the field brings to you, Barry always said, and this is the single most important field lesson I try to teach my own graduate students today.
At least I had pregnancy tests with me. It was the first time I’d brought one to the field, so that was a planning win. But other than that, how had I incorrectly prepared for this? My second train of thought was about the massive amount of fertility research I had done over the last year and of my primary care physician, who just a month ago had tried very hard to prepare me for how my advanced age
(33!) meant that I should expect to take at least a year to get pregnant. I’d prepared so hard for the difficult road, I’d overlooked preparations for the luckier and easier path that receives far less social attention (despite still being reasonably common). But, here we were, and there was a field season to run. So, what next?
Principle 2: No Matter How Right
Your Planning Is, It Still Won’t Be Easy
We packed the field vehicle and started driving, of course! How bad could this be? My mother had always told me that she felt the healthiest she had in her whole life while she was pregnant. Why wouldn’t I simply follow suit? By the next day, we’d already made it to some excellent Banksia sandplain scrub near Kalbarri, where we could hear the Heleioporus moaning frogs
calling at night and where I caught my very first Moloch horridus, an iconic Australian agamid called the Thorny Devil. We camped our way up the breathtaking coast along the Indian Ocean, with a brief detour to the Pilbara to sleep fitfully for two nights on top of a bed of unbelievably hot rocks (mostly iron, sun warmed to an unholy temperature after a very hot day), until we arrived at one of our main sampling sites near Broome. We set up our traplines and really began to catch some squamates—up to 30 different species per day!
Of course, herpetological fieldwork is never all sunshine and roses. For example, no one has done fieldwork in Western Australia without having something to say about the bush flies. Although they do not bite, bush fly densities are so shockingly high that they swarm around your entire body from dawn until dusk, no matter where you are and what you are doing. They crawl in your eyes and mouth, and no matter how many you kill, a trillion more find you. But now there were new worries, and the remoteness wasn’t so fun anymore. Was bore water, the highly mineralized well water that was the only source of potable water in the Arid Zone, actually safe to drink while pregnant? Is there some kind of safe limit to how many kilometers you can drive on horrible washboard roads before you scramble your baby’s developing brain? Mostly, we made jokes out of it all.
Let’s feed you some locally sourced wichetty grubs!
Dan said. Bush tucker is the most additive-free thing that you can eat.
I made it all the way to about Halls Creek, around 4000 km and one major field site into the trip, before the crushing nausea set in. I put a hard stop to the wichetty grub jokes and tried valiantly not to actually puke on Dan while digging holes for 20-L buckets and processing lizards in the unforgiving sun of the northern Great Sandy Desert. I struggled to eat anything, and I oscillated between anger at myself for not waiting until after the field season to stop my birth control pills (the choice I always recommend to others now!), at the bush flies for crawling in my mouth, and at the world for giving me the extreme end of the pregnancy puking spectrum that was ruining my field trip. I was pretty miserable by the time we made it to Shark Bay, where we camped on an absolutely breathtaking remote beach that was also shocking in the number of giant scorpions that wandered through our campsite at night. We’d taken to picking them up with tongs and storing them in the unused wok until the morning, just to lower the risk of a sting, and we were capturing one to two dozen per night.
Things came to a head on our third night there, when Dan was fetching a bucket of ocean water to do the dinner dishes and saw a sea snake (maybe an Aipysurus pooleorum?) foraging perfectly in the bright, moonlit water along the rocky edge right by the shore. His excited voice lured me out of the tent, where I bent over the rocks to watch until I realized I was going to vomit on the snake if I stayed there. I turned and stumbled away, tripping over the wok. Scorpions scattered everywhere, and I tried valiantly not to puke as I crawled back toward my sleeping bag.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, I thought miserably in my tent.
Principle 3: Maximize Only What Will Matter in 20 Years
That night was a turning point for me. I had missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to watch a rare sea snake foraging naturally within feet of the shore! I was going to have to herp for many more years before I got a shot at something like that again. I was embarrassed that I’d let myself stew in my own misery, sad that I’d missed one of the best herps of the trip, and determined not to let it happen again.
With difficulty, I finished the remaining field season and returned home most of the way through my first trimester. No, the nausea never went away, not the whole pregnancy—nor during my second pregnancy in 2016. But, that’s what happens sometimes. Life hands you something that is not what you envisioned but which you cannot change, and you have two choices: give up, or figure out how to make it work. Going with the latter, I wanted my guiding principle to be remembering what mattered and what didn’t. What was I actually going to remember in 20 years? Field herpetology mattered to me, and I needed to live my life accordingly!
Principle 4: If at First You Don’t Succeed … Try Again
Soon after our daughter Maya was born in December 2013, I started thinking about going back to Australia again. We started planning again: differently this time, and better. First, we planned a less-remote field season, arranging only two major stops that were both at well-provisioned field stations. We also brought along a larger field crew, including our collection manager, Greg Schneider, and one of the graduate students, Pascal Title. Our luggage was even more unwieldy, and I was worried enough about the time change disruption and the dehydration of desert fieldwork that I waited to wean Maya until after the trip was over. Somehow, we thus launched the 2015 trip … with a 16-month-old in tow.
A typical field day went like this for me: wake up, nurse, breakfast, trapline checks, nurse, lunch, nurse for naptime, process animals before naptime ends, nurse, dinner, night drive, nurse all night, rinse and repeat. I will not say that this schedule was easy. Nap times in particular didn’t always happen like they were meant to, but it was doable. In hindsight, I felt like I operated at about 50% scientist, 50% child wrangler. One thing that helped immensely was to remember my alternative, which was to be in Michigan doing a daily grind I would not remember in 20 years and where I had precisely zero chance of finding the echidnas and mulgaras I was seeing on this trip—two of my very best mammal finds of all time. It was all about keeping perspective.
It also helped that Maya absolutely loved every aspect of fieldwork (and didn’t even seem to mind the bush flies). She loved the animals, new people, and adventure, and she learned a ton of new words. She checked traplines with her own tongs, helped process animals (her favorite captures were the Notaden nichollsi burrowing frogs and gigantic Tiliqua blue-tongued skinks), and she even became the collector of record
for a Broad-Banded Sand-Swimmer (Eremiascincus richardsonii) that she found all by herself in the station bathroom. One thing didn’t go as well for her: encounters with those Thorny Devils. No lizard contact even involved, she just happened to have an inexplicable and prolonged screaming response at the mere sight of one of these spiky little jewels wandering across a dirt track. We (as terrible parents) just happened
to catch those moments on video, of course.
Principle 5: Build Your Bridges
The most surprising thing about having a kid at a field station, I found out, is how fast they build bridges to everyone around you. No matter what differences you may have in your background or experiences, kids are a great uniter of cultures. Whether it was the traditional landowners from the Martu Indigenous group with whom we were collaborating or the government gunners from the Ag Department
that had been hired to do feral camel eradications from helicopters, everyone who stayed at the field stations with us spent time interacting and laughing with Maya. They told stories of their own kids, shared music playlists for guaranteed naptime
(didn’t work), or just showed her the things they personally loved about interior Australia. Both of our kids are now old enough to have done a lot of fieldwork, and they love talking about the adventures that they’ve had in the past. Maya in particular likes to be an active participant in reminiscing about her time in Australia.
At the culmination of two long field seasons across Western Australia in 2013 and 2015, Alison Davis Rabosky and her field kid
Maya enjoy morning trap line runs while covered in dirt and bush flies at Matuwa/Lorna Glen Station near Wiluna. Photo courtesy of Dan Rabosky.
What are you made of, Maya?
we ask her.
Bush tucker and bore water!
she answers gleefully, to this day.
About the Author
Alison Davis Rabosky is an associate professor and curator at the University of Michigan who studies trait evolution in lizards and snakes. Her current work focuses on the evolution of coral snake mimicry, as well as the major traits involved in ecological diversification across snakes. She completed her BA (2002) at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, and her PhD (2009) at the University of California– Santa Cruz. She is passionate about herpetological education in all its forms, and she is the recipient of both a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and the Meritorious Teaching Award in Herpetology given jointly by the US national herpetological societies (Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, and The Herpetologists’ League).