Yesterday, SeangAun, San, and I embarked on our last day of fieldwork. We sat on the yellow-painted tourist boat baking in the oppressive sun struggling to focus on data collection tasks at hand. We came across a group of four adult dolphins, which we quickly realized were all mothers with their calves. By this time in the last several years multiple dead calves had already been recovered, however, to the best of our knowledge no calves have died at Kampi this year. Although we don’t know what the future holds, seeing these four calves together and watching them grow over the last five months I am inspired and hopeful that the mystifying deaths of the calves is potentially a concern of the past. This could easily be overly optimistic and it’s best to be cautious, but I know I will walk away remembering our last field day as one in which the Mekong river dolphin population was even just marginally healthier than it had been in recent years.
The fieldwork has gone both slow and fast. Every single day had its own mini battles – is staff available to assist me, is the boat driver available, did we get our cash advance, what in the world are the dolphins actually doing, where are the dolphins, why can’t we identify the dolphins, and the list goes on. However, with that being said I can’t believe our 5 months of fieldwork are completed. From this experience I’m learning just how much work and planning it takes to organize and execute a field project. I feel if I could do everything over again we could do it so much better! That part of me wishes we still had more time left to collect data so we could continue to improve. Despite these mixed feelings I’m proud of what our research team accomplished and will absolutely relish being out of the blazing Mekong sun for my remaining four months in Cambodia.
As a thank you to the team, we went out for dinner last night. Unfortunately, Wat was unable to come, but SeangAun, San, and I enjoyed hanging out and eating lots of BBQ!
SeangAun, San, and I
This week we also said goodbye to Gerry Ryan, the technical advisor for WWF-Kratie, who will be heading back to Australia to finish his PhD. Gerry was instrumental in making this Fulbright opportunity available to me. At the introduction of Andy Read, we began emailing in November of 2012. After many back and forth emails discussing options for projects and asking a multitude of questions regarding living in Cambodia, I arrived one year later and continued working closely with Gerry. He has been a huge asset in assisting with data analysis and I’m definitely looking forward to working with him to hopefully write up our results. More generally, his passion for conserving this region’s ecosystem was obvious and I know he was an incredibly valuable member of the WWF office in Kratie. I feel lucky to have met him.
I am also incredibly lucky because with the fieldwork winding down I have time to make a trip over to Vietnam where I’ll be meeting up with my parents. We will visit both Hanoi and Saigon and also spend one night on a boat in Halong Bay. I can’t wait!