1) Don’t bring your board game collection
I love games. When I get together with friends, more often than not we end up playing board games. I enjoy feeling like a sommelier matching each person with a game that suits them best. Not a big fan of games but love birds? – Wingspan will impress you with how well it incorporates bird biology into game play. Don’t like the competitive atmosphere of board games? – Let me introduce you to Pandemic, a cooperative game where we work together to save the world. Do you not like complicated games and prefer independent activities? Bananagrams might just be the game for you.

Mariel in a canoe during turtle surveys in early May, Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario.

Apart from the fun that board games can bring, they have also given me a huge amount of comfort. My games have accompanied me to field stations helping break the ice and were often the start of some life-long friendships. I started my career as a conservationist at the Algonquin Wildlife Research Station working as a summer student with their long-term turtle and salamander monitoring projects. I loved the work, location, and the people so much that I kept coming back throughout my undergraduate and master’s degrees. You can be sure that each year along with packing essentials like rain boots and bug jackets, I would bring a duffel bag full of board games. Playing games provided a great way to connect with strangers and avoid the awkward small talk as we started to get to know each other. It also helped me gain valuable insight on teamwork, cooperation and tolerance for bad puns – all traits that you need for a successful field season.

So with all the incredible people I know I will get to meet on this New Noah adventure, what better way to fill a suitcase than with board games? But unfortunately, board games take up a lot of space and my entire collection alone would fill more suitcases than I could bring. Thus, it is with a heavy heart that I leave my board games behind. I know though that I will be meeting other passionate conservationists who care deeply about saving the natural world, and with that in common, I am sure we will still form life-long friendships, even without my board games.

2) You can’t bring every single notebook in the world
Who doesn’t love stationary? Brand new notebooks, multi-coloured  pens, smooth highlighters – they represent so much potential for learning! So when I’m about to go on an intensive learning journey for 9 months, I want a notebook for everything. I want one to keep as a travel journal, another to jot down my nature observations, one to help me learn languages I encounter, a small one for to do lists, another for random thoughts, some letter writing stationary to write home… you get the idea. There seems to be no shortage of topics to learn about and each one deserves its own beautiful notebook.

Mariel holding a lizard in Ecuador, during a night survey.

Before leaving Canada, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find the perfect travel journal. While I’ve never kept a journal before, in 2019 I spent a month as a ‘log keeper’ in Ecuador while doing surveys on Anolis lizards and arthropods. It was my job to record everything we did each day with enough details so that we could recreate the field season in 10 years’ time if needed. It was great practice for how to write detailed but relevant notes to summarize events and key learnings (although I managed to sneak in some less relevant information like a quote of the day to remember the funny things we said). Now as I head out on this once-in-a-lifetime journey, I want to make sure I remember it and can recreate it in ten years’ time. I want to remember what I learned and what I saw. But, with an already tight suitcase and limited hours in a day, I cannot bring every single notebook nor write down every single thing I learn.

The five notebooks Mariel settled on.

In the end, I settled on bringing “just” 5 notebooks: 1) a travel journal, 2) a repurposed notebook for class notes, 3) a small notebook from the Galapagos for notes and lists gifted by a previous New Noah, 4) a light notebook to track new words from different languages I will learn as I travel to new places and meet people from all over the world, and 5) an almost finished notebook just in case I run out of space with the others that has a drawing of a turtle and on the cover, so I don’t forget home.

3) Don’t fill your suitcase with field guides
Hear me out. I will be heading out to parts unknown (to me at least) for this next year and there are few shopping experiences that make me as happy as buying field guides. I love the sensation of flipping through the pages and seeing who I might be able to encounter along my travels. Newly bought field guides give me a snapshot of all the knowledge that I have yet to learn and represent the boundless enthusiasm and love the authors and illustrators have for their taxon of choice. As a researcher, this taxon for me was herps encouraged by the turtles, frogs, toads, salamanders, and lizards that I got to work with. They inspired me to ask insightful questions about their ecology and evolution that dominated my thoughts as I pursued my undergraduate and master’s thesis where I researched the origins of temperature-dependent sex determination in reptiles. At the slightest hint that someone is interested, I can go on for hours about this topic and might even pull up some figures to help tell the story. While I know so much about the species I studied at my field sites, it took me a while to realize how little I learned about everything else in the process.

Mariel in her Ontario Parks uniform, with her dog Sol.

After I finished my degrees, I went to work at Ontario Parks first as an intern, then data analyst, and finally as an assistant ecologist before getting the Canada’s New Noah position. I was so regularly in awe of my peers who learned so much about so many topics and taxa. People who could identify minute moths but also talk for hours about dragonflies. People that dedicated their lives to learning and studying nature all around them. Inspired by their passion and knowledge, my bookshelf became full of many different field guides. My hiking backpack got heavy with all the guides I would carry with me – so many that I would end up not pulling out a single one in an entire hike. It was a hard lesson to learn, but an important one: I need to pace myself. So instead of buying every field guide I can find prior to taking off, I decided I will buy them at each location inspired by what naturally incites my curiosity in each country. I promise that I will give myself that grace and accept humility that I cannot learn it all in 9 months, but I can learn some. And with some luck, hopefully I can return and learn more in the future.

4) You can’t take your dog with you
I’m not going to lie – this one was the most difficult. My dog, a true ray of sunshine aptly named Sol (‘sun’ in Spanish) might just be who I miss the most over the next 9 months. Don’t worry, my family and friends already know that is the case. I can virtually keep in touch with them, but that does not work with Sol. Pets were the first way that animals entered my life, and I have never looked back. It started with my childhood dog, then a job working as an animal care attendant at a veterinary clinic, which was followed by work at the Toronto Wildlife Centre, a wildlife rehabilitation clinic. These stepping stones led me all the way to Algonquin Provincial Park working with wildlife in their natural habitats. It was that very first summer position in Algonquin that started me on this path that finds me writing this blog from Jersey, taking the next step in dedicating my life to conservation.

Mariel and her adorable dog Sol.

I cannot imagine my life without animals playing some major role, so 9 months without my dog will be tough. Luckily, I have started to meet and will continue to meet so many new animal and plant friends on my journey. They will keep me going throughout this incredible opportunity and once-in-a-lifetime journey as Canada’s 34th New Noah.

Packing a suitcase is just the beginning. I am excited for you to join me on this adventure as I unpack my experience on this blog and share some cool wildlife facts I pick up along the way. Here’s to new beginnings!