As part of our Tools and Tech to Save Iguanas year-end fundraising campaign, we asked some iguana conservation researchers to share their experiences in the field—and how important their equipment is to what they do. They had some great stories to relate!
If you’d like to donate to our Tools and Tech to Save Iguanas campaign to help fund field conservationists please click here. Thank you!
Getting There and Back Again
By Charles Knapp, PhD, Shedd Aquarium Conservation Director, IUCN Iguana Specialist Group co-chair, and IIF Board Member
Many iguanas live in inaccessible areas that make the logistics of studying these animals challenging. Operational planning takes creativity, and it can often end up taking the same amount of time as you spend in the field. Getting to study locations can be on foot, by bus, boat, truck, or plane, or a combination of transportation modes. But no matter how you get there, the ability to reach sites reliably is important to any conservation project, whether doing research, facilitating education programs, or meeting with government officials. And as anyone who owns a vehicle knows, the expense and maintenance required to keep it operational can be daunting. When people think of field research, they may not consider just how challenging it can be to get there and back again. But transport is a very important tool for conservation work!
For instance, while performing my research on Andros Island in The Bahamas, I stayed at an ecolodge without access to roads. Everything came in and out by boat. Andros is a flat matrix of mud, pine yards, mangroves, and shrubland. My study sites were dispersed among the hundreds of large islands and small, uninhabited cays. The biggest logistical hurdle was securing a small boat to get to study sites deep in the interior and dozens of miles away from any human settlement
I was fortunate to have institutional support, and my 17-foot Carolina Skiff, with its shallow draft, was perfect for cruising the labyrinth of salt creeks in search of iguanas. My daily exploits getting to study sites made for some comical tales, including that I learned the hard way to be conscious of the tides. On one early excursion, I anchored off an island and spent a few hours tracking iguanas in the bush. When I returned, I found my skiff high and dry on a sand bank. There is no better lesson than having to wait hours for the tide to switch, while getting harassed relentlessly by doctor flies.
These daily cruises to and from the interior also provided a peaceful respite to reflect on my work while “flying” over glassy water that blurred the horizon and reflected the clouds. Other times, tropical storms made cruising a harrowing experience. When a blast of cool air hit my face, I often knew when storms were approaching. I could maneuver around some cylinder storms but was forced to go through others, while getting needled in the face with driving rain, pounded and soaked by wind-whipped waves, and panicked by the loss of visibility.
On one occasion, I was able to help some stranded fishermen. While heading to a remote site, I noticed two people on the edge of a cay that I was passing. I veered the skiff to investigate, because it was such an oddity to see anyone, let alone without a boat, in these areas. While throttling down on approach, I noticed that the two bedraggled, glassy-eyed men did not look well. One was wearing the bottoms of a wetsuit, the other was in shorts. They were each wearing one trimmed diving fin to help walk over the jagged and sharp limestone rock. They let out an audible gasp when I invited them on the boat and thanked me profusely for saving them. They had been stranded for two days after running out of gas while fishing, and they were trying to swim and walk to a settlement. I am not sure that they would have made it, and I was honored to help them.
My research experience on Dominica was different. It is a large, inhabited island, and I “cruised” the island in a Suzuki Jimny mini-SUV. There my adventures were driving a vehicle with the steering wheel and stick shift on an unaccustomed side while careening around narrow mountain roads. My field assistants piled in this small vehicle along with our research gear, and they piled out like a clown car when we reached our destinations. One time I had to yell at everyone to bail out of the SUV because we did not have enough power or traction to climb a hill, and we began rolling backwards down the trail to the edge of a cliff. Another lesson learned…!
During my field research adventures, I was fortunate to have institutional support to pay for transportation equipment. But most of IIF’s grantees struggle with getting to their study sites. This struggle results in less time doing conservation work in the field. The equipment often comes with a high price tag and reoccurring maintenance costs that are difficult to find grant funds to support. IIF is proud to have provided critical funding support for a variety of transportation equipment, often from our year-end campaigns, which has facilitated iguana conservation work on Utila, Dominica, and Guatemala. It’s an ongoing need, and something we seek to help with whenever we can. With your help and donations, when a worthy proposal for a critical conservation project is received, IIF can deliver support. Your contribution helps make the field research possible—and helps save iguanas.
