Volunteer Perspective
By James Thorson

James Thorson, veteran SDRP volunteer, contemplating the life aquatic.

I was reading an online magazine the other day and in a reader's forum they were asking people what they would choose if they could repeat any 600 seconds (10 minutes) of their life. People mentioned weddings and times with their children and I'm sure if I thought about it I could come up with some of those too. But the very first thing that sprang to mind was 10 minutes in Argentina last March with Pablo Bordino and his crew when we let go the last of the Franciscana dolphins we had tagged.

We were out for the last day of a two-week project where we had hoped to satellite tag 5-7 Franciscanas. Weather and rough water had limited our time in the field and we had only put out two tags when, on our last possible set, we managed to catch three at once, including a mom and an older calf. With three dolphins in the net we needed more people in the water than the handful of us who had worked on the Sarasota captures so Pablo put in most of his crew, a number of whom had never been in the water with a wild dolphin before. A flurry of activity followed as we got our hands on the three dolphins and in turn got the two larger individuals onto a boat for quick measurements and tagging. Everyone in the water worked together as a team and in short order we had one of Pablo's crew doing the final "three, two, one" count down as we let the last dolphin swim off.

As we watched them go our group of researchers now felt like a bunch of old friends and we cheered and hugged like a college basketball team that had just won a national championship. A photo of that last moment is sitting on a shelf in my office here in Minnesota as I type this and I look at it often. I've worked with Randy Wells and the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program off and on for 20 years now, ever since I came across them through the Earthwatch Institute back in the mid 1980s, and I don't think I have ever had a more gratifying moment. I am very grateful to Pablo for making me one of the few non-professionals invited to participate in his research.

There are many opportunities to simply donate money to a favorite cause, but what has made those last two decades so rewarding to me has been the opportunity to make a more personal investment in both wildlife conservation and the advancement of science. To be fully immersed in a field so different from what I do the rest of the year has been an adventure and an education. To find that in that time I have developed skills and knowledge that I can take to another part of the world and help others begin a similar journey makes it even more fulfilling.