Wildlife Vocalizations: Grace Soechting

Wildlife Vocalizations is a collection of short personal perspectives from people in the field of wildlife sciences.

As a deaf person, I use American Sign Language to communicate.

Growing up, I experienced many communication barriers and forms of discrimination, but I never let them stop me from doing what I love. I have faced some situations where people told me that I could not do things just because I am deaf. I do not accept the words, “No, you can’t.” I work hard to prove wrong the people who tell me that. Although we, deaf people, are faced with challenges others do not understand, we can do anything except hear.

However, one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in my profession was not having an ASL interpreter with me for three weeks when I was in Africa doing small mammal research and vegetation measurement. There were a lot of communication barriers. For example, conducting fieldwork was difficult because there was a lot of verbal communication, so I had to find another way to receive information or ask questions by using gestures or notes on my phone. These forms of communication take a lot of time and effort and are not as effective as using an interpreter because often major points are missed or skipped over.

Although at times I struggled to understand, I was very fortunate that I had great people in the group who tried their best to keep me updated with everything going on and to communicate with me. I ended up having fun and had a great experience working on the research in Africa.

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