There’s the old advice that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Well, for some very adventurous person out there, the perfect job exists. All you have to do is monitor the Gough Island bird population—and live in the middle of the ocean between South Africa and Antarctica.
You’ve heard of remote work, but you’ll have to filter your job search down to “extremely, incredibly remote” to find the Royal Society for the Protection of Bird’s job posting for a new field technician on Gough Island.
A whopping 1,500 miles from the South African mainland, the British territory is home to approximately 8 million birds and no permanent human population. It takes seven days in a boat to reach the eight-mile-long island, which doesn’t have an airport.
If this is speaking to the part of you that’s always dreamed of traveling as far off the beaten path as you possibly can, same.
But with adventure comes challenge on Gough Island. The two women currently in the position describe extreme weather (the island is in sub-Antarctic latitudes) and long periods of isolation. And since fresh fruits and vegetables run the risk of carrying foreign bacteria to the remote island ecosystem, a year’s worth of frozen and canned fruits, veggies, meat, and other food is left on the island with the staffers when they’re dropped off.
“The main thing I certainly miss is just like a crunchy carrot, or being able to bite into a nice apple,” Lucy Dorman, one of the current Gough Island field technicians, told the BBC. “Just some crunch, but apart from that, I don’t feel like I’m really missing much.”
The compensation isn’t exactly royal either—the job comes with room, board, and a salary between £25,000 and £27,000 (around $31,500 to $34,000 USD). Of course, people will pay big money to get to places like Gough Island, so a paycheck for living there isn’t the worst deal. So you could kind-of look at it like one the most extreme, and exclusive, birding trips in the world.
Working to travel is a pretty classic way of seeing the world. Odds are you know someone who’s worked on farms to support their backpacking trip across Europe, or have done so yourself. There are plenty of other ways to do it, including seasonal and remote work. Some sectors have even come to rely on visiting workers willing to travel to out-of-the-way destinations—such as, say, operating ski lifts in mountain towns, or researching avian ecology on remote sub-Antarctic islands.
Unfortunately, applications have closed for the Gough Island field tech gig this year. But keep an eye out next year if you think you’re the “highly motivated and disciplined candidate with relevant fieldwork skills and a keen interest in wildlife, who can adapt well to small island living in a challenging and remote sub-Antarctic environment” that they’re looking for.
And we totally get that watching birds for a year on a very small rock in the middle of the ocean sounds like a little bit more than you want to sign up for. Especially with the no-fresh-food situation. But still, take a quick perusal through the stunning photographs of wild, far-out Gough Island—doesn’t it, just a little bit, make you want to get a little further off the beaten path?
Miyo McGinn is a writer, fact-checker, and self-described aspiring ski bum based in Washington. Her bylines can be found at Grist, High Country News, and Outside. She covers US and global news stories for Adventure.com.
