No One Warned Me About the Wasps…Life as an Avian Ecologist

I should have turned back when the first wasp nearly collided with my face.

I should have closed my car’s back passenger door and just gone back inside. But I had an appointment to make. And besides, how crazy would I have to be to suspect that a nestful of them had infiltrated my car via Trojan horse?

I mean, sure, earlier that day I had been driving around collecting old birdhouses to conclude my master’s thesis field work. And yes, wasps had found the birdhouses quite homey in the past. That’s why I had checked the birdhouses before taking them down. Or so I thought.

Besides, that morning when I had driven back home there had not been a wasp in sight. Wouldn’t a nest of kidnapped wasps have made their ire known long before? And anyways, even if that one wasp had come out of my car, surely it had been alone. Just to be sure, I opened my trunk and peered in at the unassuming birdhouses. No buzzing, no signs of movement. I closed the trunk and concluded I was safe.

Dear Reader, I was not.

The second sign…

The second sign something was wrong was a little mass that caught my eye when I checked the left side mirror. I merged left and spared the mass a second glance. It was a little mass with six little spindly legs pointing straight up. Bright red and dead, there it was. A wasp on my dashboard.

I pushed down a little harder on the gas pedal.

That’s when I heard the buzzing.

Every muscle in my body clenched. I forced myself to take my eyes off the road and look in the rearview mirror. Oh. My. Gosh. A wasp, very much alive, was standing on the back dashboard, facing the window. It lifted its wings and flew towards the sky, crashed into the glass, and fell back. Lifted its wings and tried again.

This was my exit. Took my eyes off the wasp to merge right. Over the click, click, click of the indicator, I heard a clack. clack. clack. each time the wasp collided with the glass. Three minutes away now.

I looked back into the rearview mirror. The wasp was standing still, and I realized with horror it was putting two and two together. That flying in that direction was getting it nowhere and maybe if it switched directions…I looked back at the road. Only parallel parking available. I pulled alongside the front car, turned my wheel all the way to the right…

The wasp raised its wings.

Waited till my wheel bumped against the curb.

Like a helicopter, it hovered in place, slowly turning around.

Wheel all the way to the left.

Made eye contact in the mirror.

Yanked the keys from the ignition and leaped from the car. Just as I slammed the door shut, the wasp entered the front seat area.

Just another occupational hazard

When I was a starry-eyed freshman coming into research for the first time no one warned me about the wasps. No one told me about the freezing conditions or spending days without cell reception. The occupational hazards section never quite made it into any career books I read in middle school.

But honestly, I’m so in love with research, these occupational hazards just add to the charm. I don’t have office drama, I have adventure.

Maybe I’m just chill, or desensitized, or wholly lacking a fear of death. But at the end of the day, whether I’m lost in the Australian outback or racing to escape a wasp-infested car, nothing comes ever comes close to making me regret my career choice.

Updates

Speaking of career choices, I’m prepping to go to an anthropological conference next week. Though I am not an anthropologist, that anthropology class I took last semester has kind of drawn me in. Research-wise, the data collection portion of my project has concluded and I’m working on analyzing the data accurately and writing up the results. Started a little side project as well, which delayed graduation until next semester, but, hey, I’m in no rush!

Oh, also, that was 7 total wasps that I found in my car the next day after I had left the wasps to burn to a slow death. Very grateful I didn’t die 😀

For more anecdotes like this, follow along!