By Rachel Bergeron, PhD candidate at l’Université de Sherbrooke

I landed my first Biology internship in my second year as an undergraduate student. I spent that entire summer running around Gatineau Park, looking for endangered fauna and flora, and monitoring populations of invasive plants. I could not believe anyone would be willing to pay me to hike all day, stopping every 10 meters to identify a plant or bird of some kind (a habit that annoys my non-biologist friends and family greatly). I have followed that love for biology and fieldwork ever since. It has led me to Arizona to chase lizards, Ontario to chase mice and chipmunks, the Canadian Rockies to chase bighorn sheep, and Australia to chase kangaroos as a doctoral candidate.

I was lucky enough to join a long-term research project monitoring a wild population of Eastern grey kangaroos in one of Australia’s most popular national parks, Wilsons Promontory National Park in Victoria; a project that came with the fieldwork of my dreams. It involved living at Wilsons Prom in a research station a few minutes away from some of Australia’s most beautiful beaches, and walking among and capturing kangaroos most days. Kangaroos are crepuscular, meaning they are active around dusk and dawn much like our white-tailed deer. Fieldwork was therefore conducted in two 3-4 hour sessions per day, from a little before sunrise to a few hours past sunset. During this time, one of us conducting fieldwork would be capturing kangaroos, while the other would be observing them. We would take note of which kangaroos are still alive, which ones have young, which ones are hanging out together and where, which males are winning fights, and so on.

Now how does one capture a 2 meter tall, 70-kilogram kangaroo with 2-inch claws and a kick you do not want to be on the receiving end of, you may ask? The answer is drugs. While you may be picturing a dart gun, the approach our team has been using for 16 years is far more creative. It involves a syringe affixed to a 6-meter window cleaning telescopic metal pole, aimed at kangaroo bums. It allows us to sedate the kangaroos for an hour or two so we may weigh them, measure their legs and arms, check their pouches for young or lactation, check the condition of their eyes and teeth, and make sure they are generally in good health. It also gives us the chance to mark them with unique combinations of colourful collars and ear tags, so that we may observe them from a comfortable distance for the years to come. Each kangaroo is caught at most once a year, and only studied via binoculars otherwise.

I think my favourite aspect of fieldwork is the opportunity it provides to discover the environment you work in, whether it be your home ecosystem or a new one, up close and personally. Boy, did Australia provide a new environment to discover. Its biodiversity is so different to the one I know best in Southern Quebec. The entirety of its fauna and flora were new to me, aside from the occasional (incredibly destructive) invasive species such as red foxes, feral cats, and European rabbits. How surreal it was to walk through grassland among kangaroos, wallabies, wombats and emus, with flocks of incredibly colourful and loud cockatoos and parrots flying above. To conduct fieldwork in the complete darkness of the night and not worry about bears or cougars, only about falling into the holes dug by wombats in the ground, sometimes a few feet deep. By the end of the field season, we were able to recognize nearly a dozen species of marsupials, invasive mammals and nocturnal birds from only the colour and shape of their eyes reflected in our headlamps. On a nice dry night, the ground often seemed to glitter from the light of our headlamps reflected in the eyes of thousands of (harmless) spiders.

While some of us tend to see Australia as the land where everything is out to kill you, I was quite surprised to find out Australians have the same vision of Canada! Whenever I would mention home, they would inevitably hit me with “Oh my goodness, the land of bears, wolves and cougars!”. I would then remind them of their dozens of deadly snakes and spiders, not to mention crocodiles, sharks and jellyfish.

My fieldwork in Australia is now complete. This summer, 2024, was the first I spent at home in a few years. This fieldwork has been especially meaningful to me. I joined the project team in January 2020, meaning that a certain pandemic made me wait patiently for my opportunity to fly over to the land of the kangaroos. More than once, I planned a field season, sorted visas, booked flights, and had to cancel everything as a new wave hit. By the time I finally landed in Sydney, what had started out as an MSc had turned into a PhD and I had been studying a creature I had never seen, for over two years. Thankfully, the wait was well worth it!