I arrive at the field site. With one hand I grab a bucket containing various types of tape measures, orange flagging tape, a clipboard, a GPS, and a bottle of water. With the other hand I grab a machete. I am ready for work.

I can always tell if I am the first person on a trail in the morning by how many spider webs I snap with my face as I hike. If it’s a Monday and nobody came down during the weekend sometimes there are huge spiderwebs across the whole trail. And you know how in Indiana Jones type movies they always very dramatically and slowly swipe aside the spiderwebs as though it takes effort? I always thought, come on, it’s not hard, you can’t even feel any resistance from a spiderweb. Well, I may have been wrong. The supporting strands on the webs here are almost as thick and strong as a strand of human hair. It’s amazing. I like to very dramatically and slowly swipe them aside.

Occasionally I come to a place in the forest full of butterflies. They tend to congregate by species and all of the butterflies I see in the forest are large and black: black with a big purple spot on each wing, black with yellow squares like lace at the edge of the wing, black with blue dots, brownish black. They are startling and eerie, like the ghosts of the birds that are gone now. It always seems extra quiet when you walk into a group of them.

If I take my ear buds out while I hike there are 2 sounds I usually hear. One is small scurrying animals and dead leaves. The animals are small lizards- skinks. Usually brown, but occasionally I’ll see one with a bright blue tail, and even saw one the other day that was entirely baby blue. The other sound is a scraping sound, and sometimes followed by what sounds a little like a golf ball being dropped. That is the sound of a coconut crab scraping its claws on the craggy limestone as it crawls, followed by it getting scared of me and pulling into its shell and falling off the rock, pinging against stones as it goes. I always feel a little bad about that.

The girl I replaced out here referred to hiking in Guam as working out on a stair-stepper in a sauna. That’s pretty accurate, except that there aren’t mosquitoes in saunas. I use bug spray, but since I’m sweating a couple of liters per hour it doesn’t usually do much. (Now you know I’m a scientist! Just look at that use of the metric system!)

At some point I depart the trail and start making my own. The point is to find a place where I can hike for 100 yards in a straight line and then count all the cycads in a 2 meter swath along that line, taking various measurements. This is where the machete comes in handy. I’ve gotten pretty good with it. I’ve pretty much passed the point where I’m worried that in some over zealous effort to chop through a vine I’ll hack into my shin instead. So that’s good. I’m pretty much an amazon woman with an mp3 player.