The longer the silence went on, the more my hope dwindled.
I meandered around a flooded mesa, listening for songs or calls of golden-cheeked warblers (aka GCWAs), the endangered songbird I studied for a monitoring project. During the breeding season the air would be thick with male warblers singing, defending their territories against intrusive males and wooing females to mate. Their songs had dwindled as unpaired males gave up and sought a mate elsewhere and as successful males became too preoccupied chasing their brood to even maintain a territory, let alone defend it. Now, on a humid day in late May, the chances of finding any more nests seemed remote.
It had been a tough season. Ice storms had delayed the male warblers, so instead of staggered arrival times that allowed us to map initial territories and band unbanded males before nest searching began in earnest, males and females showed up simultaneously. Even worse, the weather had slowed our training efforts, so we had to gain additional practice banding birds while trying to make sense of territories, account for banded and unbanded birds, and search for signs of early nest-building. The chaos that ensued saw some fronts succeed—we banded almost every unbanded male on the study site—while others failed miserably. Our worst category by far? Finding nests.
Disappointment hung over the last month of the field season. Even the best moments, the weeks where we collectively found three or four nests, were tinged with what ifs. No matter how many nests we found the rest of season, we would still come up massively short of expectations. Even though we knew that much of this was dictated by circumstance—poor weather, scheduling issues, lack of expected overtime—that knowledge couldn’t cover how large the deficit was. Bad luck or not, we still held ourselves responsible at the end of the day.
I felt like a failure. While I enjoyed most aspects of avian fieldwork, I considered nest searching my specialty. While all my duties had a physical and mental component, nest searching proved the most mentally stimulating. GCWAs build small, well-camouflaged nests high in trees in very dense vegetation. GCWAs are also notoriously secretive birds, giving few clues to nest locations. Nest searching is the detective work of avian ecology, and GCWAs are like the sicko criminals whose true crime documentaries captivate generations of white women. I had signed on for the field season with high expectations. I wanted to find at least twelve nests. I wanted to provide leadership to other technicians who weren’t as experienced with this specific species. I wanted to give the project incredible results. I wanted to be the best. And I wasn’t. I didn’t care that circumstances had made things more difficult. I didn’t care that no one else thought I had failed. To me, I had let the team down. I had let myself down. I had found only four nests the entire field season—out of around twenty total—and I was determined to find one more. Maybe it was just an arbitrary round number, maybe it was only one more data point, but I wanted to end the field season with a victory.
So, on a hot, humid Tuesday in May, with less than two weeks left in the season, I trudged through my field site, which had been pounded by flooding rains the week before and seemingly abandoned by most of its previous avian occupants. I visited every territory that hadn’t yet produced offspring, but no birds sang. With my possibilities dwindling, I reluctantly turned to Purple Waffle, who I heard singing while I meandered the western edge of my subplot. I usually dreaded his territory, which mostly consisted of a steep slope with some of the densest vegetation on site and straddled the border between my subplot and one of my coworker’s, KC, who was also my main competitor in the nest searching contest. She had bestowed Purple Waffle his name, based on the symbol she used for him on her maps (I gave my birds much cooler names like Rocket, Nightfall, and Fiesta). Purple Waffle lived what we thought was a mundane life, singing from the same four trees and rarely turning up anywhere else. But I had no other leads other than stumbling after him as he made one 50-meter flight after the other to visit the same four singing trees he always visited, cursing at him (mostly) under my breath and hoping he’d eventually do something different.
After nearly an hour of monotonous behavior, where my only entertainment came from trying to jump the steep ditches that Purple Waffle would soar over in self-satisfaction, Purple Waffle flew to a different tree. A new location! WHAT WAS THIS MADNESS? I pushed buttons on my GPS feverishly. After a few minutes, Purple Waffle began foraging and pulled a fat green worm out of the tree. This finally gave me the chance to learn something valuable. The warblers would typically eat their prey immediately unless they had an active nest or fledglings—in that case they would fly off with the food (a food carry, as we call it in the business). I desperately watched Purple Waffle, not moving, not taking my eyes off of him, screaming “Carry it!” in mind, internally begging for one last chance at a nest. Purple Waffle bounced around a couple of branches then…flew off with the food in his mouth! Food carry, mfers! I was back in business. I saw which direction he had flown, and I knew it had been a longer flight, so I had a solid lead on finding his nest (or fledglings). Sometimes a food carry leads to an easy nest find. More often it comes hard. And a lot of times you still never find it.
This wasn’t going to be an easy nest find.
Purple Waffle was gone, but I had a GPS point, a direction, and about three hours left in the workday. Since we shared the bird, and since the food carry was technically on her subplot, I sent KC a text message to alert her. Half an hour later I heard a truck sloshing through the muddy stream that had once been a road and KC appeared moments later, full of frantic excitement. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to find another nest, and now an ember of hope had been kindled in the dying ashes of the field season. I told her everything I had seen and we split up, watching and listening for any signs of the GCWA. Hope and tension flowed through me. Both of us wanted the nest to be found, but both of us also wanted to be the one to find it. I expected to hear a triumphant shout at any moment. She expected the same. But water dripped from the shin oak leaves, loose bark drooped off the ashe juniper, and the sodden air hung heavy with silence. Purple Waffle had vanished.
Another day passed, slow and hot except for occasional bursts of chaos. KC spotted Purple Waffle with a female around 8am, and we tracked them all over the mesa top for twenty minutes, sprinting and shouting and feeling the electricity of the search, before they vanished in the opposite direction of where I had seen him food carry. I ran into Purple Waffle a few hours later as I walked back to my truck for lunch and watched him fly with food in the same direction as the previous day…but very far from the initial food carry. I careened back into the forest, almost impaling myself on an unfriendly juniper branch, and fired a typo-ridden text message to KC as I peered helplessly into the blinding sunlight. I didn’t see him again the rest of the day.
We met in the office at 6am on Thursday morning. The surge of hope from the previous two days had been pulverized and a creeping tendril of failure snaked through the room. We were at the end of the road for fieldwork and the clock kept ticking on Purple Waffle’s nest. From our intel, it seemed likely that Purple Waffle had a nest with nestlings that would fledge within three or four days. But with Friday scrapped for non-fieldwork duties and no overtime for the weekend, Thursday was our last shot.
The chaotic events of the previous morning did not repeat themselves. Hour after desperate hour slipped away, with Purple Waffle only showing up just enough to keep us from leaving, but never doing anything interesting. Doubts began to creep in. Our search radius ballooned to an unwieldy 200 square meters. KC patrolled the perimeter, investigating any faint chip she heard, while I plopped down in the mud in a thick grove of ashe juniper a third of the way down the mesa slope, which was our best guess as to where the nest was hidden. I passed the time by scribbling on my map and field notebook, plotting coordinates and trying to make sense of the confusing data we had gathered thus far. Purple Waffle did not act like a typical GCWA, but the answer had to be in there somewhere. Which were the crucial variables? If any coworkers saw my mad scribbles, would they assume I was crazy? If so, did this situation have A Beautiful Mind upside?
Noon brought another crew member, Mike, who had grown bored of his other work and had wandered over to help. He also delivered unwelcome tidings from our boss—we were expected back early for a meeting. WTF? Based on the time it would take us to drive back, we were down to our final thirty minutes. After a few minutes of jibber-jabber, we split up, Mike heading further along the mesa while KC and I circled our suspicious grove of trees. The added time pressure actually rejuvenated my hope. My last wisps of optimism and excitement combusted with a potent influx of tension and drama. Every detail of the forest came into sharp focus. I was going to find this little shit’s nest. This would be the last nest of the field season, and in my heart I was a true nest searcher.
From the bottom of the mesa, a warbler sang.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the song, trying to pinpoint the bird’s location. My mind raced to process this twist; I certainly hadn’t expected Purple Waffle to have a nest that far downslope, but in that moment everything made sense. As the last note faded, I opened my eyes, feeling time slow for just a few heartbeats, and stared through the sun-dappled juniper grove at KC. This was the moment we had expected for 48 hours. The triumphant shout that would signify the ultimate success of the team, but the moment of glory for someone else. One warbler song doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but in this case we both knew it meant everything.
We surged down the mesa slope, whirling through the long, sharp juniper branches, dancing through the mud and over fallen trees. My normal clumsiness had been overcome by adrenaline, grace and fluidity replacing my typical baby giraffe-esque motor skills. The clarity I felt was breathtaking. I saw a twisted, broken path spooling out before me, made every move with confidence, realized every obstacle seconds beforehand and made smooth adjustments. I heard KC cry out in surprise as the juniper ensnared her behind me, and in that moment I knew it was mine. I ran alone down the treacherous mesa slope, scratched, bleeding, covered in dirt, finally bursting through one last tangle of branches into the blaring sunlight. Into…the valley?
I stood on the battered dirt road that marked the boundary of the study site, looking into the scrubby grassland of the valley. Only a few stands of oaks sprouted here and there. It wasn’t warbler habitat. But Purple Waffle hadn’t proven to be a typical warbler. Maybe everything with him was an exception. I plunged through the long grass, unconcerned with rattlesnakes, my focus only the nearest clump of the trees in the valley. The warbler sang from that clump as if in reward, pleased that I finally solved his riddle. I saw him fly into a massive Texas Oak, watched him bounce from branch to branch toward the top left branches. He crept beyond my view, and I took two large steps to my right. And there it was.
NEST HO! I had never seen a nest that big, that shape, that high in that particular species of tree. For a second I even thought I was wrong. But then I saw Purple Waffle fly up to the nest, bill full of mushed-up caterpillar, and duck his head in to feed. I watched him for a few moments, until the female flew in and crawled back into the nest to sit on the nestlings, and Purple Waffle flew off in what seemed to be a random direction. I fired off several text messages in all caps to KC and Mike, helping them navigate to my location. We blew off the meeting. Instead, the three of us sat in the grove of oaks (in poison ivy, oops) for the next hour, discussing the insanity of this bird (at one point he food carried 350 meters which is freaking nuts) and waiting to get resight confirmation of Purple Waffle’s band combo. I had found the nest and accomplished my last goal of the field season, but I could tuck away that detail to savor on my own. Every nest is a team effort, and this crazy, convoluted nest search had been the greatest team effort of the season. In a season pocked by failure, taking time to enjoy our last major success before we went our respective ways, to laugh and marvel at the absurdity of the bird we had spent three days chasing, made it all worth it. The Ballad of Purple Waffle was over, and it was a song all of us could sing.