Corn dog

Today I started a week of visits to rural areas of Sichuan Province, helping some Chinese colleagues to carry out large scale surveys of the province for bears. This involves both climbing up mountains to look for signs of bears, and asking people who live near the forests if they have seen any bears recently, or know the best mountain to climb up to find them.

Biologists often think that the transects and collecting samples part of conservation is the real science, and surveys and interviews with people are easy. Unfortunately this means that a lot of these surveys are rushed and badly designed, leading to poor data on which decisions are then based. It’s great to be invited along to address this, but I did have to constantly reassure the team that, yes, social scientists can climb mountains too.

This was from the first house we visited. The family dogs were asleep on the drying corn, which may make me think twice about eating the corn from here. Although ticks and fleas are probably protein rich, the dog hair may be an annoyance.