By Geoff Morgan
Office space at the Alberta Conservation Association can be a sight reminiscent of mankind’s earlier roles as hunter/gatherers.
Wildlife biologist Shevenell Webb’s office is filled with natural artifacts she found during her field work in Alberta’s wild lands. There’s a bighorn sheep skull next to her computer monitor and full grouse tail feathers decorating her whiteboard.
“It’s a conversation piece,” she says, noting that other biologists like her find items on trails. Surrounding Webb’s desk, pine marten, badger and eastern coyote pelts hang from the walls which she says inspires curiosity in the people who visit her indoor workstation.
The ACA is a not-for-profit with eight offices across the province from St. Paul to Lethbridge to Cochrane. Webb’s indoor office is in Sherwood Park. The associaiton’s long-term research projects are funded in large part by levies put on hunting and fishing licenses which allow the ACA to publish studies on the health of wildlife populations.
For every wildlife biologist, Webb says, there’s a necessary division of time between the data entry of the chair and desk and the research work in the province’s mountains, forests and rivers. She laughs as she says that she’d rather be outside, “We obviously get into this work we like being outdoors.”
You’ll find her other office – her outdoor office – shelved neatly in the console of a truck, a helicopter or a small six-wing Cessna airplane. Webb might also work out of a tent trailer for longer stints in the field. These highly mobile outdoor offices for wildlife biologists require clipboards, filing folders, compasses and binoculars. Everything, she says, needs to be wrapped with brightly coloured flagging tape: “We’ve all lost pretty much everything in the field that you can lose.”
With a laugh, she adds bear spray to the list. She has seen every type of animal in her work, including the very shy ones like wolverines and the Canada lynx. During a bird survey a few years ago, she came within 30 feet of a black bear which, she says, was a bit too comfortable spending time near her group.
ACA biologists like Webb mix their time between the indoor and outdoor office through every season. Webb conducts bird surveys in the early morning hours of the spring and works on interpretive trails and vegetation surveys through the summer. During winter, her office goes aerial as she climbs aboard helicopters and small planes to count ungulate populations – definitely one of the cooler parts of her job.
Data entry and analysis, however, is done behind a computer screen at a conventional desk. It’s the other half of her job, which means coming down from the mountain top and doing the hard science on Alberta’s wildlife populations.
Offices like Webb’s show what happens when an outdoorsy worker is cooped-up inside. The shelves are filled with books on wildlife and photos taken in breath-taking mountain ranges. Much of the typical office grey is replaced with green as the artifacts and their stories get carried in from outside.
Webb, who will be going on maternity leave in September, will return to ACA to work both indoors and outdoors. “That’s ultimately my connection and why we have passion for what we do,” she says of her own work and that of other ACA biologists.
“If you lost your connection with the field, then you might lose that connection with how things work in the environment, so it’s important to get outside.”
Category: Officeland
Leave a Reply
