This is a short story of “how I started from scratch” with the hope of hearing similar stories from my friends here.  I happened to have the opportunity of being an important member of a team for constructing a conversation management plan for Bumdeling Wildlife Sanctuary, a protected area in northeast Bhutan in early late 90s and early 2000s. I worked with different subjects experts from both outside and within Bhutan. I stayed weeks and sometimes months in the jungle collecting biodiversity data. Me and my teammates also collected social economic data (from the residents inside the sanctuary using semi structured questionnaires) so that we are able to come up with a holistic conservation management plan for the sanctuary. Since we were a pioneering team, information on the sanctuary was scarce but we could manage to gather some information on mammals, birds, flutterbys (rare but we managed) forest types, and socio-economic development. The most glaring lack of information was about the amphibians and reptiles. There was no information about the taxa, nothing. So, I started scratching from the dust at the country level and I was surprised that the country didn’t have even the preliminary information. Whatever was done included an expedition by Basel Natural History Museum in the early 1970s (the information from the collection being published in 1992 by scientists who did not actually collect them), and a document or two from the zoological survey of India that dated back before I was born. Thus, this lack of information prompted me to take up the subject and in 2008 I started a snake and lizard diversity project in the Sanctuary with funding from an in country environmental trust. From there, there was no looking back. The country now has a list of species that we keep improving with time. With data I collected over the years, I completed my PhD and I turned from Conservation Management Planner to a Herpetologist although I haven’t lost the vigour of how a protected area management or state reserve forest plan is made. I wanted know if there are any friends here who struggled like me to get information that led to expansion of subject you cared or have to completely change the subject?