Karen and Markus are world travellers and avid adventurers.  For the second leg of their trip, they are bicycling through Europe and recording roadkill observations for theASC Roadkill Survey for Road Bikers.  For more on their trip, visit their website http://2enroute.blogspot.com/.

There are many reasons the average person might stop and stare at Markus and I as we go about daily life on this trip. It might be because we are pushing fully loaded bikes up flights of stairs in a crowded train station. It could be the impossible-to-ignore fluorescent orange biking vests. Or it might be because we are standing in the middle of a road photographing squashed toads.

Irina Muschik is a wildlife biologist from Germany who has been East through Russia interviewing wildlife researchers for her project, Greentrousers.  She has been collecting data for several ASC projects including Pika Monitoring and Roadkill Observations.  Irina was recently interviewed for the Photocase blog.  During the interview below, she describes what inspires her to connect with wild spaces and collect data.  This interview was originally published on 1/16/2013 here. 

“Sometimes, you have to take one step back, in order to move forward”, writes our photographer Irina in the account of the first part of her travels through Eastern Europe, Russia and North- & Central Asia last year. After a short break, she will continue her journey this spring. Travel destination this time: Alaska. Read more about her travels in our interview.

Hi Irina, tell us a little bit about yourself! Who are you and what do you do?

I grew up as a real country kid in Westphalia, Germany. For a long time, I didn’t want to leave home. That’s why I decided to start training to become a digital media designer in the neighboring place after I finished school. And that’s also how I came to join Photocase back then. But working in a small and very conservative advertising agency soon didn’t offer any future perspectives for me any more so I decided to start over. At that time, someone gave me the advice to become what I dreamed of as a kid, which was (apart from the wish of becoming an artist) animal ethologist. This was the job title of Heinz Sielman, whose nature documentaries I loved when I was a kid. Without further ado, I studied biology in Bochum and my childhood dream really came true! In my final thesis I studied the domestic behavior of raccoons in the Müritz National Park. The study of wild animals and/or nature conservancy is definitely where I see my professional future. That’s where I feel at home.

Particular to our bike, we are piloting a program for ASC that collects data points on roadkill.  The idea behind it being that humans build roads without regard to what natural spaces and animal paths those roads might be cutting through; the results of this division of land has meant millions of animal deaths and millions of dollars in property damage for people and state governments.