On the 30th July I travelled from Windhoek to Montpellier in the south of France, the location of the ICCB. A nice quick journey (read: painfully long and without sleep) from Windhoek to Montpellier via Johannesburg, Dubai and Paris including a 4 hour train ride. So my first day in Montpellier was spent settling into my uni accommodation, attempting (and failing) to have a midday nap and meeting up with my supervisor from UQ. Fortunately the meeting with my supervisor was a late lunch with a glass of wine in the beautiful centre of Montpellier. I then spent the rest of the day searching the city for where the conference would be held and where I’d find my pre-conference workshop. This seemed trickier than planned. Perhaps 48hours without sleep coupled with a glass of wine was affecting my map reading ability. In good news I stumbled across a couple of lovely touristy sights in the process (photos throughout). On my second day I attended a workshop about promoting myself as a scientist to better improve the reach of my work and of course, my job prospects. Step one: create a blog. Check! But it seems in this day it is not merely enough to publish and even blog, you also need to tweet. Step two: get a professional twitter account. Once I am back in Australia I will need to suss out this mystical land of tweets and interject myself with some classic witticism and self-promotion. My first tweet will likely be “how does this thing work”, shortly followed by a second, equally embarrassing tweet of “oh, that wasn’t the search bar… [awkward silence]”. Fortunately both those tweets are less than 140 characters, so at least I have that part sorted.

The conference started the next day. I was surrounded by over 2000 conservation scientists and ready to mingle. Because my PhD is not ready for presentation yet I went to the conference as an observer and networking extraordinaire and was not presenting a talk or poster. As a UQ student I was part of a big group - there were over 70 attendees from UQ alone - by my calculations possibly the largest single-organisation group at the conference. Astonishing considering the distances we had to travel. However, I tried my best to keep a little separate from those I knew, in an attempt to make new connections and learn new things. Knowing I could have ended up at the conference for 5 days without working up the courage to meet anyone, I had set up a few meetings in advance. These were with researchers whose work I am interested in and thought would be good contacts going forward. Between these meetings, a few chance meetings, and the odd dinner with colleagues I feel like I meet some really interesting people and enough to justify the cost of the conference and travel. Over the 5 days of the conference I attended sessions and symposiums on everything from wildlife crime, to the use of drones in conservation, to remote sensing, to getting scientific evidence used in conservation. There were sessions on citizen science, the role of religion in conservation and even a “pop-up” lunchtime workshop on Cecil the lion. The Cecil phenomenon had blown up online in the days prior to the conference and we had a number of people in attendance that have worked with Cecil/ on lions in that park (Hwange National Park) so it seemed fitting. All in all the conference was hectic (with 11 sessions running side by side at all times, meetings in breaks and workshops at lunch) but it was a great experience to learn from, and connect with, other researchers.