Preparing for the season
by Luke Dollar
June 21, 2005

Once we arrived in the field for this year’s research season in Madagascar, we had to unload all our equipment from storage and prep our campsite as an operations center. We’ve got more than half a dozen research projects running concurrently, and they all require some specialized equipment (stay tuned for dispatches on them all). That makes for hundreds of pounds of gear, tarps, traps, tents, radios, generators, shelves, test tubes, nitrogen tanks, microscopes, GPS units, water filters, and more. It took us an entire day to move things from our storage house in Andranofasika into the camp refectoire (see us standing in the empty room), then divide up for field projects and camp use. Quite a lot of heavy lifting!