A series of ridiculous events: Fieldwork

In which I convince absolutely no one to become a field biologist

Matagorda Island, Texas, USA (2014)

I’m not sure if I’ve ever done anything more ludicrous than running into a flock of flightless pelican chicks with the express goal of grabbing one by the neck, but then again I did choose biology as a profession so I guess it’s kind of a toss-up. The chicks can’t quite fly yet and they’re not at all built to run on land, so it’s a task that seems straightforward until you’re actually in the middle of the fray. It’s frankly terrifying to hand-catch a creature that looks like a miniature dinosaur, complete with a wingspan that’s the same size as yours and a foot-long spear attached to its face that it’s actively trying to stab you with.

I finally isolate one from the pack and after a pathetic slow-motion stab-and-parry routine by the both of us, I bat aside its bill and grab the bird. I fumble my free arm around its body, feeling its four enormous lungs crackle oddly under my fingertips like bubblewrap. I proudly return to our field base with my prize. In the time it took me to catch one chick, the other more professional scientists have already measured, banded, and released two birds. Dammit.

The easiest way to hold a baby pelican, for the uninitiated, is to put its body in your lap and hook its neck and head under your arm so its dagger-face can’t whip around and bite you. Of course, this still leaves you in perfect range to be scratched by its surprisingly sharp talons and shat on, but as someone who has been shat on by at least eight wild animal species, you get used to it. Or at least it’s better than being bitten, and I say this as someone who has been bitten by at least eight wild animal species. See above note re: career choice.

I am just about finished placing the chick’s leg band when it happens. I turn to talk to one of my colleagues, and BOOM. I’d dropped my guard for a second and the bird had seized its opportunity. The hooked tip of its bill caught me square on the left cheek, nailing me just below the eye, and pinched like an overenthusiastic grandma. More shocked than injured, since the point wasn’t sharp enough to draw blood, I jerked back and looked around to see whether any of the other scientists had witnessed that.

Oh, all of them? Excellent. Maybe it’s time to switch to plants.

(Clockwise from top left) One of the more professional scientists catching a chick from the herd. Not as easy as it seems // Another more professional scientist catching two chicks in one go // One pelican chick is being weighed (it’s been wrapped in a pillowcase), another is being banded, and two more are just chilling in the chick-holding tent waiting to be processed // Me trying to figure out how to pick up this ungainly bird // Me holding the offender just before I released it.

Mustang Island, Texas, USA (2014)

A cluster of adult Wilson’s plovers is running frantically around a patch of glasswort plants, a behavior that usually means there are itty-bitty chicks hiding somewhere nearby. I sidle closer, and they all let out startled PEEP!s and run faster. I’ve worked with these birds for two summers and still can’t believe how fast they can run. Somehow these five-inch-tall birds can actually outrun me, their bodies almost levitating while their bright yellow legs flail underneath them like tiny Olympian athletes.

One of the males blurs past me and I recognize his unique combination of colored leg bands. It’s James Bond, so named for a tiny geolocator backpack he’d worn last year with the ID number 007, something we’d found so delightful that we’d given him Union Jack-colored leg bands to match. His backpack, which I’ll take a hot second to explain, used some pretty neat nanotechnology to track his whereabouts for an entire year using only sunlight and an internal clock. This particular bird had worn the penny-sized backpack during his annual migration to Central America and back, beating some frankly terrible survival odds for a full year, and then I’d re-found him and re-caught him to recover the device and the data saved on it. Only then we realized the internal battery had died and we had to ship the geolocator back to the manufacturer in England to recover the data, and then…

DHL lost the overnighted package, and our data was gone forever.

I’ll never forget, DHL.

But anyways, not the point of this story. As I get closer to the screaming adults I take a quick scan of the horizon, trying to see through the dancing heatwaves and check for coyotes. The clever local canines have learned who I am and that I know how to find camouflaged plover nests and chicks. They will hunker down in the grass and watch me do all the locating work for them, then they’ll dart out for a plover-baby breakfast the second I walk away. Sometimes all I can see of them is their fuzzy ears poking up from behind a low dune. Today it looks like the coast is clear, so I descend on the group of panicked helicopter parents to begin the hunt for chicks.

Usually there are only a few parents standing guard over their young, but today I’ve found a group of at least 12 adults. It’s odd, but it’s also late in the breeding season and I just assume this just means there are a lot of chicks hiding in the glasswort for me to catch and band. Finding thumb-sized camouflaged birds hiding underneath opaque vegetation isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and I have to hunch down extremely close to the ground if I have any chance of finding them. Every time I take a step I have to painstakingly check every square inch of ground first, and I lay hands on every individual plant to check for chicks underneath.

I’ve been looking for five minutes and I’m just starting to think it’s a little strange that I haven’t found any babies yet when I finally see a hint of movement: a flash of beige amongst the green. Like a hawk I zero in on it, positioning myself above it in such a way that the chick won’t be able to get too far away if it does decide to bolt. I crouch even closer to the ground, spread my hands and feet wide, and am just about to lunge when I realize with a burst of horror that I wasn’t a few inches away from grabbing a chick at all, but rather the tail of a seven-foot-long snake.

I swear like an Irish sailor and almost fly backwards. When my brain finally catches up, I realize the adults hadn’t been peeping at me at all; they’d been surrounding the snake in an effort to keep it away from their young. I’d just been caught in the crosshairs of an inter-species battle. From a safe distance I can see that the snake is non-venomous at least, but in the moment all I’d been able to process was TEXAS-SNAKE-RUN.

I’m pretty sure that two-second ordeal shaved a full year off my life.

(Clockwise from top left) There are two chicks and an egg in this picture; the camera is about two feet off the ground // A clutch of 1-day-old snowy plover chicks, already able to stand and run // A less-than-day-old Wilson’s plover chick next to its in-egg sibling // A 3-egg Wilson’s plover nest in dense glasswort vegetation similar to the one in which I found the snake // James Bond, an adult male Wilson’s plover. The stalk of the geolocator device is just barely visible near the base of my supervisor’s thumb.

Paso El Triana, Argentina (2019)

We’ve flung ourselves deep into the steppe of Patagonia, an hour’s drive from the nearest town, and “town” is a very strong word. The only humans for miles around are the four of us field biologists and four sawyers working at a family-run mill down the road.

At this point in my PhD career, I’ve drilled over 300 dendrology cores out of trees, so I’d like to think I know what I’m doing. I’ve also been handling powertools since I was about seven (cheers, Dad). But our drill is notoriously torque-y. I often have to chicken-wing my left arm over the auxiliary handle and grip the battery pack while my right hand runs the trigger, to keep the foot-long borer from getting stuck in the tree and sending the drill twisting around instead like something out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. I’d learned this trick only after spraining my wrist a few times. Incidentally, I’d also learned that I have terrible trigger discipline and don’t instinctively let go when things go wrong. Are you smelling what I’m cooking yet?

All things considered, I have my drilling routine down pat: Check drilling direction button. Start slow then hammer the trigger until the borer is all the way in. Extract the wood core. Switch drilling direction button. Hammer the trigger to pull the borer out. Great success, 100% of the time.

Until the 301st core, when I finally make the dreaded 50-50-chance error with the drilling direction. I’m expecting the auxiliary handle to twist clockwise into the crook of my chicken wing rather than away from it, so I don’t grip the battery pack. WHACK. Before I can even process what I’ve done, the 5-pound battery has punched my entire skull sideways. Blood pools in my mouth and I instinctively spit. My eyes seem crooked. Stunned, I poke around my face bones to see if anything broke. I feel a little vindicated when one of the men tries to pull the stuck drill out of the tree and swears when it twists his wrist, too.

Fortunately I’m pretty sure none of my teeth or bones are broken, although I can feel a cut inside my upper lip that goes almost all the way through my cheek. I am bleeding profusely with no first aid supplies on hand (whoops). We’re a mile from the sawmill and an hour from the closest doctor…but also only five trees away from being done with field work for the day. With shaking hands, I spit again, pick up the offending drill, and get back to work. Back in the saddle so the fear can’t take hold, right? Never again do I make the mistake of relaxing my trusty chicken wing.

The cut bled nonstop for over a day, and I still have the scar. You can see it in the middle of my right smile line when I smirk a certain way. It’s almost nice to bear a physical scar from my PhD in addition to the normal psychological ones I’ve been picking up along my higher education path. Every time I smirk at myself in the mirror, my scar asks: do you remember that one time you punched yourself in the face with a drill while extracting tree cores deep in the Patagonian steppe? Cuz I sure do.

I guess plants weren’t such a great career choice, either.

Upper Peninsula, Michigan, USA (2010)

Secretive marsh birds are the ninjas of the bird world. Some of them will plonk down for hours at a time and pretend that they are grass. Others move around, but at 10% the speed of normal life. They’re so shy and so perfectly camouflaged that you’ll only ever see them if you’re exceedingly lucky. This is great for them, since their fish prey still haven’t managed to figure out these magic tricks, but it’s not particularly conducive to scientists who are trying to count their population sizes.* Then some genius discovered that if you play recordings of bird calls, real birds of the same species will get all territorial and start calling back. Hey presto.

Marsh birds are chattiest at dawn and dusk, so my supervisor and I had traipsed out into the open wetland about two hours before sunset. We were given GPS waypoints to survey and a track to follow, since the points are scattered throughout a wild marsh with no foot trails and plenty of open water. Our protocol is simple: play the call-back track at each point, record the number of birds who holla back at you, rinse and repeat. It had been a dry summer, which made marsh-stomping a bit easier, but it was also the kind of weather that deer ticks just love. So we modify the protocol a bit by crouching on the soggy ground and listening for birds as instructed, while also periodically looking down to casually pick off the front line of the endless army of ticks crawling up our pant legs. I don’t really mind, until I feel the inevitable tickle on the back of the neck that screams “HEY YOU MISSED ONE.”

Our surveys all go according to plan, which is frankly unheard of in the field biology world. We finish our last point just after the sun winks out, as intended, and fire up the flashlight and the GPS to work our way out of the labyrinth. And then, juuust after a cloud bank rolls in and true dark falls, our lone flashlight dies. In the middle of the pitch-black marsh.

The good news? We’re professionals and we had packed a spare set of batteries. The bad news? The spares were already being used by the GPS, because the GPS batteries had died about five minutes after we’d left the truck. So we had a choice to make: flashlight or GPS? Like that old beer commercial where two broke guys choose to buy beer over toilet paper and then both desperately answer “PAPER” when the bagger asks whether they want a paper or plastic bag, my boss and I simultaneously say into the darkness: “FLASHLIGHT.” 

Now we can see, at least, but how do you navigate out of an unfamiliar swamp when you can only see ten feet in front of you? Picking a heading might work on dry land, but out here walking a straight line would put us in the water pretty damn quick, and there are no stars or moon by which to navigate anyways. Following the natural contours of the grass islands would keep us dry, but it might also lead us deeper into the marsh to where the Fae Folk live. So begins a hesitant hike completed in literal step-by-step increments. We make headway for awhile and then reach an uncrossable stream, or get the gut feeling that we’ve gotten turned around. It becomes a delicate game of transferring batteries back and forth between devices, trying to orient the polarities correctly in the dark and taking excruciating care not to drop one of the four AAs since the marsh would immediately swallow both it and us forever.

By the grace of the Fae Folk, we make it out unscathed about an hour after the fiasco. I permanently increase my field gear list to include one set of spare batteries PER device.

The number of secretive marsh birds we heard, you ask? Zero. The number of ticks I picked off my pant legs, neck, and skin? Fifty-six.

(Clockwise from left) Imagine a marsh like this, only without the trees // Obviously I don’t have any pictures of secretive marsh birds because you know, secretive, but here’s a super ugly egret chick from Texas // Tick-proofed pants. Not pictured: shirt also tucked into jeans.

*Like canaries in a coalmine, tracking marsh bird population sizes can tell us a lot about the health of wetlands, which in turn is an indicator for health of the overall ecosystem. ~*The more you know*~