Field trip - Part 1
p. At the weekend, I heard an interview with a family who make and use “bat detectors(Information about bat echolocation from the Bat Conservation Trust)”:http://www.bats.org.uk/batinfo/batdets.htm and rescue injured bats, on John Peel’s [“Home Truths(Just Plain Batty - listen to this segment again)”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hometruths/20031215justplain_batty2.shtml]. It reminded me of a field trip I went on when I was an undergraduate.
p. At Bristol, there were Botanists, Zoologists and Biologists (like me) all in the same department, but the Botanists went on different field trips to the rest of us. Their course T-shirts read “Botanists have all the best trips” superimposed on a picture of a marijuana leaf. This was something of a triple entendre—while the Botanists got to sun themselves in Corsica[1], we Biologists/Zoologists languished in the drizzle of Gloucestershire. We consoled ourselves with the idea that they had to spend two weeks staring at boring plants, while we would have exciting animals to look at, all the while entertaining the rebellious thought that it would be nice to look at exciting animals somewhere a bit sunnier.
