DAY IN THE LIFE of a wildlife biologist & answering YOUR questions

[Music] [Music] [Music] hey everyone welcome to another day in my life as a wildlife biologist and this one is gonna be my day doing some fall fieldwork out here so I'm gonna be going out with a partner so I won't be able to film too much in the fields but I'll give you a little bit of an idea of what I'm gonna be doing today I'm gonna be doing some general wildlife habitat assessments so we're gonna be walking the area where they're going to be putting in a project they're gonna be building something and we are gonna go check to see what kind of wildlife features are out there we're gonna be by a river today so we're looking for like eagle nests red-tailed hawk nest like stuff like that like Raptor nests as well as any wetlands that could hold em Finian's because we need to know about those and we're also gonna look for some bad maternity roost trees all sorts of like general habitat things we're also gonna assess the suitability of that habitat for our species at risk that we have here in Canada I really enjoy doing these types of surveys because it definitely takes in like a big ecosystems perspective rather than like specifically just listening for one bird it's kind of a nice little field step for me I'm here in Alberta it snowed pretty early so all the leaves are off the trees so it's not super pretty but everything kind of turned brown but it's still nice to kind of be out towards the end of my field season before winter [Music] I seriously like I'm gonna age so prematurely because I've been exposed to like way too much Sun and my skin is looking awful [Music] never always a swamp losing swamp those things super tasties triangles here moose prolly good foraging grounds in here [Music] [Music] all done for the day just coming back to my hotel great so I'm all done for the day we bushwhacked for probably eight hours or so today to the river we were doing some Raptor nests surveys it's not really nesting season right now in the fall but we were just checking to see if we could see like any stiffness or anything the trees checked out some wetlands and saw a whole lot of bear sign moose deer lot of moose out there cuz it was all like swampy and nasty so most really liked foraging out there so now I'm back in my hotel room I was gonna go in the jacuzzi there's like a hot tub down there but there was a bunch of kids in it and I kinda just want to relax oh and I think for the rest of the night I'm probably gonna watch Lord of the Rings so that's about it generally I'm like exhausted when I get back so I don't too much in my hotel room besides cook and eat so good old fall fieldwork [Music] alright guys so I am back from the field and I'm gonna answer a few of your guys's questions that you sent in to me just so the first question that I get the most is what is the difference between a zoologist and a wildlife biologist so against this one's pretty simple actually a wildlife biologist and a zoologist are pretty much the same thing typically if you're wildlife biologists use a little bit more in jobs but it's really the same thing not much of a difference at all so a degree in zoology versus a degree in wildlife biology are gonna be pretty similar that's the answer that one so another question that I get as well is what kind of experience you need to have to be a wildlife biologist so this question really differs based on what you want to do so I only have a bachelor's degree which has been fine for me so far but a lot of people do have a master's degree in the United States you'll find that a lot more or in areas where there's a little bit more competition for jobs where I am in Alberta there is it's more of a focus on construction where you don't necessarily need as much of the advanced education but I'd say pretty much half and half of our wildlife biology stuff either has a master's degree or a bachelor's degree we don't have anyone with a PhD on our staff but I do know of some other consulting companies that do have PhDs as well so I travel the majority of the time in the summer probably eighty to ninety percent of the time I'm traveling and then in the winter it's more like ten to twenty percent of the time that I'm traveling and then as well I would say if I wanted to I could take probably two months off of work usually not consecutively but like I take two weeks here and there like all the time throughout the winter it is quite slow for us in the winter since a lot of the animals either migrate south like birds or they hibernate so there's really not that much to see so things are definitely a lot slower in the winter so we catch up on a lot of our reporting and all that kind of fun stuff permitting applications so that we're good to go for the work in the following summer another question I get all the time is how I stay safe out there when there's like bears and wolves and all that so we for bears we do always carry bear spray and we always go out with a second person so there's never just one of us there and we use GPS to kind of find our way and we have a truck usually not parked not too far away so that works out fine and we don't carry any guns or anything like that though some jobs you do and wolves do not attack people so that is not really a big thing to worry about another question I get all the time is how I got my job as a wildlife biologist so I already made a video it's like pretty long I go into exactly step by step how I got my job and how my journey kind of unfolded and how I got to where I am today I am going to link to that video above and then below in the description as well too so if you're interested you can hear into a lot of detail what I did and then some tips as well to help you guys get a similar job basically when you start out a lot of times you're in the field for a while like usually like five to ten years in the field so that's involving a lot of travel kind of learning your technical skills how to identify certain wildlife everything that you need to learn about animals is best learned actually in the field however a lot of times wildlife biologists will actually transition into an office role after they've been in the field for a while you know and they want to kind of be home more often for one reason or another that's more of a position where you are managing wildlife biologists in the field overseeing their research like in the case of being you know a professor a leader of a lab as well as there's like a ton of environmental planning jobs and they might not necessarily be as wildlife focused as some of the other jobs you might do right in the field you're still incorporating your knowledge of ecology and science to write reports for permitting applications if you're working for government then maybe you are dictating policies that are gonna be put into place concerning wildlife and a lot of those are actually in the office so there's definitely options to travel a lot less you just have to seek out those time that's kind of office based positions over the field positions so this one is really hard to answer because it just varies so much you can start at minimum wage I think my first internship I made minimum wage some my internships I made nothing so there's a lot of unpaid jobs which is really unfair to a lot of people who need to work but unfortunately there is a lot of unpaid drops there's even paid jobs like through I've even seen jobs where you had to pay to work there so just be aware that those are out there and but also be aware that you can get paid as well - in an internship I think I made in my first internship around $12 an hour and that was with city government and then my next job I made around coz around 23 dollars an hour and that was my first job out of university where I did some field work and I did a lot of more administrative type of things not as an Alberta and then the most I've ever made as a wildlife biologist that was when I was actually a private consultant I made almost a thousand dollars a day so you know there's this huge gap in pay scales so I will say I live in an area with a lot of industry a lot of oil and gas industry so the salaries are quite a bit higher than you would see somewhere where you don't have all the construction and industry so so to become a wildlife biologist you do not need a degree in wildlife biology I do not have a degree in wildlife biology I have a degree in ecology I think my official degree is environmental systems ecology behavior and evolution and that's from the University of California and San Diego that environmental systems program is the one that I did but you can do wildlife biology with anything that's like ecology environmental biology marine biology even environmental science wildlife management zoology anything like that is going to be a good option to get you a degree in wildlife biology just make sure that you get internships or research experience in university to put on your resume before you graduate because that's going to be more important than what your degree title says I also want to emphasize especially with these these types of videos where I'm showing all the cool stuff about wildlife biology it's actually a really tough job to do there's days I think about going into another field it's hard to travel every single summer and not really have a summer it's hard to work so much like like this week I've worked 60 hours already and I still have to work tomorrow so it's never-ending I get last-minute requests it's hard for me to you know make plans with my friends because they get last-minute requests to go out into the field with an hours notice like not every wildlife biologists job is the same but I think these are common concerns that a lot of people have in this field so there is a lot of downsides as well to I don't want that to discourage you but take a realistic view of the situation of knowing what you're getting into so these are all the questions I have for today and I'm gonna go back to work if you guys have any more questions that I haven't answered you can ask them in the comment section I reply I try to reply to every single comment and question that I get that doesn't always happen when things are really busy for me but I'm going to try so if you guys who are watching this video want to be a wildlife biologist as your future job comment in the section below and let me know and subscribe to my channel as well if you want to see more videos like this I will see you guys next time

Channel: Kristina Lynn

Views: 26,631

Rating: 4.9708638 out of 5

Keywords: wildlife biologist, day in the life wildlife biologist, how to get a wildlife biologist job, zoologist vs wildlife biologist, wildlife biologist career, vegan below zero, wildlife biologist major, environmental science job, day in the life scientist, stem careers, environmental jobs, jobs where you can travel, wildlife biologist job, wildlife biologist canada

Id: J14GXzMWaLk

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 18 2018