Field trips in grad school?! AWESOME.

My department has a weekly seminar called the Cabinet of Natural History (cabinet as in the case where naturalists put their specimens... like a museum cabinet full of cool stuff!). It has been meeting since the 1980s, and they publish papers and write books and the presentations are just generally fascinating. One week a researcher presented on a military testing site on the east coast of England called Orford Ness, and then the next day we went there! It's a long skinny gravel island, really a sandbar, and completely flat and barren and COLD and deserted, and dotted with deissued military bunkers. It's owned by the government, so it's open to tourists but no one goes there because it's scary and also still secretive and largely unknown, even by the people who live nearby! The UK did secret military testing here from the 1920s until 1996. Radar was invented here, as was the trigger system for the WWII atomic bomb and later atomic bombs during the Cold War. They actually had an atomic bomb on display! Because they did so much bomb testing here, you are urged not to leave the designated pathways. SERIOUSLY.

(ordnance = BOMBS)

This week the Cabinet went on their annual Fungus Hunt. One of the professors is an expert mycologist (fungi scientist!), so this trip is really designed to add to his fungus collection. The idea is that we all run around and bring him mushrooms and he identifies them and gets excited if they're poisonous or rare, and REALLY excited if they're edible! Here's a photo of his mushroom-full "trug" (special fungi basket made only in Suffolk- very scientific?).


I spent a whole summer collecting fungi for the Field Museum and I was not super excited about doing it again (fungus-collecting is one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that you should only have to do once in a lifetime...) so instead I had a great time watching the distinguished HPS (history and philosophy of science) scholars and students get excited about fungi. And then, just at the height of my participant-observation, I found a fossil. It's a little brachiopod shell, stuck in a chunk of rock that I happened to spot. Clearly my mind was not on mushrooms... My supervisor thought that was hilarious because my first essay is about paleontology and I've been living/breathing/reading fossils for a month. While other people were vying for "Most Deadly Fungus" or "Most Colorful Fungus" or "Most Rotten Fungus", I got the distinguished title of "First Fossil Found on a Fungus Hunt". :)
I love out-of-classroom science learning!