Sacha Heath

Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellow, Living Earth Collaborative

You mentioned you are using AudioMoths* in the field now, due to COVID-19 restrictions. Do you feel like you’ve become more dependent on technology this summer and if so, is that necessarily a bad thing?

“Yes, 100% I have. We’re Zooming now (for this interview). Right now I’ve Zoomed more than I’ve ever Zoomed in my entire life. Two of the conferences I was going to attend this year are going to be completely remote. The way I network and communicate with my colleagues is now done all through technology.

I’ve actually used remote recording devices before in my research. It’s a really handy tool. But my project this year is completely dependent on these devices. The summer has become an opportunity for me because I’ve been wanting to switch over towards more remote methods that don’t require so much in-person work. I love doing field work, but I’m moving into a phase in my life where I’m pretty excited to test out technologies that expand our ability in terms of what a single person can do out in the field. I tried out something I’m completely unfamiliar with in the technological realm. The pandemic pushed me in that direction.

It’s been really interesting. We check in with our Tyson team quite frequently and we communicate a lot on Slack. We figured out this one thing that actually is really fun and it surprised us all. We’re on the bird, tick and wildlife team, so one of the tasks for the group is learn how to identify birds. One Friday, I thought, ‘Oh, let’s go to one of the remote bird cameras set up at bird feeders,’ like at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It was incredible! I never would have guessed it, but it was literally as though we were out in nature birding together, seeing the same things and the same time and asking each other questions. We’ve gone to Ithaca, New York, we’ve gone to Panama, we’ve gone to hummingbird feeders in Texas. It broke the wall between our screens a little bit.”

* A low-cost, open-source acoustic monitoring device used for monitoring wildlife.

Sacha is collaborating with Solny Adalsteinsson and worked with Solny’s Tick & Wildlife Ecology team during summers 2019 and 2020.