How far would you go to conserve birds? Some scientists and volunteers take it to the extreme, risking bodily harm — whether from cliffs, undertows, frostbite, exhaustion, or armed poachers — and performing feats of athleticism that would make an X-Gamer proud.
Obliterating the stereotype of pale and feeble scientists hunched over beakers, these “action-hero” avian protectors thrive in inhospitable places and are often on the front lines of the extinction crisis. (Though this profile focuses on birds, “extreme scientists” work across an array of fields, from deep-sea divers, spelunkers, and hurricane-exploring pilots to researchers who feed lab mosquitoes with their own blood.)
“There’s just a ton of cool things that bird people do,” says Justin Hite, field supervisor at the Kaua’i Forest Bird Recovery Project in Hawaii, adding that, on the whole, he finds his fellow field ornithologists to be outdoorsy, passionate, daring, and smart, and he enjoys “hanging out by the campfire [with them] and sharing stories about all these crazy adventures.”
Climbing hotshots
As rock climbing has exploded in popularity, so too has the ability of researchers to access the nests of tree- and cliff-dwelling birds. In fact, dozens of scientist-climbers now operate across North America, banding the chicks of everything from California Condors to Bald Eagles (and at times collecting their eggs or young for captive-breeding purposes).
Steve Faccio, a conservation biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, recalls the adrenaline rush he felt while banding Peregrine Falcon chicks in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “They’re really amazing birds,” Faccio says of the fastest flyers on Earth. “I feel really fortunate to have had that opportunity to work so closely with them.”
At the time, Peregrines in his home state were only just starting to recover from the devastating effects of DDT poisoning, and Faccio was recruited to keep tabs on them. A skier and mountain biker, as well as an amateur rock climber — he jokes that he “knew enough to get into trouble but not enough to get out of trouble” — Faccio enlisted some of Vermont’s best climbers to help him reach the birds’ inaccessible nest ledges.
Generally approaching from above, Faccio and his cohorts would rappel down, being careful not to dislodge shards of rock onto each other’s heads. When the climbers reached the nest, the male Peregrines would usually fly off, Faccio says, while the larger females would stick around. Though sometimes they watched intently, at other times they went into attack mode. “It can be pretty intense,” Faccio says. “When they come screaming by in a dive, it sounds like a jet coming past. The first couple times, I remember really hugging the wall of the cliff.”
He was never hit, though he recalls a fellow climber being grazed by a falcon. Another fellow climber had his hat plucked straight off his head.
Elsewhere, a Peregrine once split an eyelid of Craig Koppie, while a different Peregrine struck Joel Pagel no fewer than nine times in a row. (Both Koppie and Pagel are longtime U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service raptor biologists.)
Peregrines, though, are “relatively cautious,” Faccio says. Not so Northern Goshawks, which are infamous for raking their talons across the back of researchers’ necks.
Raptor work can be grueling and dangerous. Pagel, who has run ultra-marathons, reportedly hiked 25 miles off trail — and traversed two rivers — to reach a Peregrine nest, and he has also dangled by rope off towering bridges. Other Peregrine researchers have been lowered from helicopters and rappelled down skyscrapers.
The inherent danger of such work has ended tragically on a few occasions. In 2020, for example, wildlife biologist John David Bittner, director of the Wildlife Research Institute in Julian, California, fell to his death in southern California while trying to change the batteries at a Golden Eagle nest cam.
Climbing scientists study not just raptors but songbirds as well. Caroline Blanvillain of SOP Manu, BirdLife International’s partner in French Polynesia, regularly navigates sheer, waterfall-lined cliffs to reach the nests of the critically endangered Tahiti Monarch. And in Hawai’i, Hite of the Kaua’i Forest Bird Recovery Project spent several seasons scampering up precariously balanced 40-foot extension ladders — hauled in by helicopter — to collect ‘Akikiki eggs for a last-ditch captive-breeding effort.
With only around 10 breeding females remaining, the ‘Akikiki could be “effectively extinct in the wild as soon as this year,” Hite explains, though, since it’s not gone yet, he and his colleagues plan to work tirelessly to save it. (Avian malaria, exacerbated by climate change, is the main cause of its recent decline.)
Island lifers
Since Columbus arrived in the Americas, about 90 percent of bird extinctions have occurred on islands, and that’s where some of the most hard-core conservation work currently takes place.
In 2011 and then again in 2012, for example, a team of biologists rode 30 hours by boat to reach Nihoa, a 171-acre speck of rock in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands that served as the sole home of the critically endangered Millerbird, an Old World warbler. Forced to scale cliffs and dodge crashing waves as they leaped ashore from an inflatable raft, the biologists captured 50 Millerbirds in mist nets over the course of their two trips. From there, they ferried the birds on three-day voyages to the sister island of Laysan, where invasive rabbits had wiped out a different Millerbird subspecies roughly a century ago.
The new Millerbirds on Laysan have since spread across the whole landmass, thus providing a bulwark should anything ever happen to the Nihoa population.
“Nihoa island is probably the hardest fieldwork I’ve ever done,” says Sheldon Plentovich, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Pacific Islands coastal program coordinator, who lists steep, rocky, and crumbly terrain, heavy equipment, aggressive nesting seabirds, blustery winds, blazing sun, rip currents, lack of a landing beach, and “over-my-head” swells as some of the challenges. “There’s calculated risk in all of it, and we have to pick a certain type of person to go” — like, say, surfers and free divers — “because it’s so demanding.”
Plentovich, a former professional kiteboarder who surfs daily (even on the morning of a recent shoulder surgery), has since returned to Nihoa several times to do bird monitoring and invasive plant eradication, and she remains in awe of it. “This is my dream place,” she says, pointing out that, unlike most other Hawaiian islands, Nihoa has largely retained its native flora and fauna. “It’s cool to be able to get a glimpse of what things were like before humans just changed the landscape so drastically.”
In Bermuda, scientists have likewise translocated endangered Cahows, or Bermuda Petrels, in addition to providing them with artificial burrows, fitting them with geolocators, and hand-feeding chicks. As part of his work, a leading Cahow researcher has reportedly sliced open his hand and knee on sharp rocks, nearly been struck by lightning, impaled his boat on a limestone spike, and even been bit on the nipple by one of the birds.
Much other island work these days involves eradicating invasive species, especially rats and cats, which are major predators of ground-dwelling birds. Since New Zealand began pioneering the technique around the 1960s, more than 1,200 attempts have been made worldwide to rid islands of non-native mammals, with a success rate that’s now over 90 percent, according to Steve Cranwell, BirdLife’s invasive species manager.
Conservationists also battle invasive insects, such as acid-spraying yellow crazy ants on Johnston Atoll, a one-time nuclear testing site that’s a surprising seabird haven.
These relatively cost-effective projects have arguably prevented more extinctions than any other conservation action. Yet more islands remain to be depopulated of mammals that were brought in by humans. In fact, a 2019 study found that nearly 10 percent of the world’s rarest vertebrate species would reap huge benefits if a mere 169 specific islands were restored.
The planning stage for such operations, which involves everything from fundraising to securing the support of the local populace, can take years. With rat-infested flatter islands, workers arriving by boat can walk around distributing rodenticide manually, whereas helicopters or drones may have to be used on jagged islands.
Sticky situations can arise. Cranwell, who grew up alpine climbing, biking, and backpacking in his native New Zealand, recalls camping a few years ago on an uninhabited islet near Rapa Iti in French Polynesia when a massive storm blew in and swept away his team’s boat. “We all had a hellish night,” Cranwell says, “because it was pouring rain and howling wind, and the tents all got flattened and flooded.”
A larger boat was requested from Rapa Iti, though reaching it required swimming hundreds of yards through rough seas. Tehani Withers, island restoration project manager for SOP Manu, who was also on the trip, twisted her ankle on the rocks offshore. “I could not swim because of the sudden pain,” she recalls. Luckily, “divers waited in the water to help us get on a buoy if needed…and I was pulled in. Then to go back to the main village in large-wave conditions was pretty horrendous.”
Even when things go smoothly, Withers and her colleagues deal with heat, water shortages, steep climbs, skin-lesion-causing bacteria, and dive-bombing terns. “Paradise does have its challenges,” Cranwell says.
Yet the rewards are immense. Withers explains, for example, that the critically endangered Polynesian Ground-dove recently repopulated a certain atoll after cats and rats were removed. “This job is so important,” Withers says, “not only for nature, for the functioning of the ecosystem, but also to protect the forgotten past of the Polynesian ‘Maohi’ community.”
Brave souls
Every spring and fall, large flocks of birds migrating between Europe and Africa touch down in Malta, an island nation located smack in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Unfortunately, Malta has among the highest densities of bird hunters and trappers in the world, nearly all of whom break the law at one point or another, whether by shooting protected species or illegally using callback tapes, according to Nicholas Barbara, head of conservation at BirdLife Malta.
“Instead of finding a place to rest, these birds are finding guns and nets waiting for them,” says Barbara, who points out that the Maltese hunting lobby wields “huge political influence.”
To reduce the carnage, BirdLife Malta preserves land, runs educational programs, rehabilitates injured birds, pressures the Maltese government, and campaigns for the European Commission to take action. More confrontationally, its staff and trained volunteers fan out during migration to hunting hotspots, where they attempt to film poachers with handheld cameras and then turn over the evidence to the authorities.
The work is not for the faint of heart. “Some people are not used to the sight of a bird being blasted in front of them,” Barbara says. “It is a situation that we encounter on a daily basis.”
It’s not just the birds that are in danger. Conservationists in Malta have had their cars shot up and firebombed and their tires slashed, in addition to facing constant verbal abuse and threats. Barbara himself has been punched in the mouth, for which he required dental surgery, and he has been sued by a hunters federation.
The situation is much the same throughout the Mediterranean region, where around 25 million birds are illegally killed each year. Besides Malta, some of the worst culprits include Italy, Egypt, and Cyprus, where in 2021, a volunteer with the Committee Against Bird Slaughter was beaten viciously as he attempted to report on unlawful trapping.
We must “be active and engaged,” Barbara says, “and not be intimidated by these people who commit illegalities.”
In the United States, bird poaching is less of a problem. But researchers still occasionally come up against armed adversaries, including illegal marijuana growers operating deep in the woods of California, who have been found to be incidentally poisoning Spotted Owls, Pacific fishers, and other rare animals. While participating in a cleanup of one of their trash-filled grow sites in 2013, a volunteer who was trained to be airlifted into rough terrain fell to his death from a helicopter.
Cold weather warriors taking action
On a frigid morning this past January, Lucas Savoy arrived at a Maine lake and scoped out five Common Loons that had become trapped by encroaching ice. “This is the time of year they’re typically on the ocean and molting their flight feathers,” says Savoy, the loon program director at the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI). But these loons had lingered too long, and, due to a recent cold spell, the long, open-water runways they needed to take off had closed up.
So, Savoy and two other BRI biologists got to work. Strapping on the kind of dry suits used by cold-water divers, as well as safety ropes and life jackets, they headed out onto the ice, dragging a gear-laden raft and sled behind them. “It was pushing our limits of comfort,” Savoy says. “If the ice was any thinner, we wouldn’t have done it.”
The mission took all day, but the team ended up successfully netting all five loons, which, after a brief veterinary checkup, were released into the ocean. “We joked that we were going to have a fancy dinner afterwards,” Savoy says, “but we were all so tired we stopped at McDonald’s instead.”
Savoy and his team have been doing similar rescues for years, as have scientists in New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, though the work has picked up lately thanks to funding secured from an oil spill settlement. Between the four states, 30 or 40 loons were saved this past winter alone, Savoy estimates, which “as a regional effort can really make a difference [for such] a long-lived species.”
Thus far, the rescues have gone off without a hitch, though an assisting firefighter did fall through the ice on one occasion (and was quickly pulled back up). Savoy has engaged in other hair-raising escapades as well, spending two winters, for example, binding himself to the bow of a lobster boat to net Long-tailed Ducks and affix them with satellite transmitters.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Stephanie Prince, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ high seas program manager, endures even colder conditions, for far longer periods of time.
Prince has spent two extended stays on South Georgia, a sub-Antarctic island, once for 16 consecutive months and then again for 13 months, and she separately did a two-month stint on Antarctica itself. “There aren’t any breaks, as the logistics of getting in and out are too difficult,” Prince explains, adding that the trip back home to the United Kingdom includes a “pretty hairy boat journey” across the Southern Ocean.
Prince concedes that “sitting in a Snow Petrel colony for seven hours waiting for birds to return to the nest” — when it’s minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit outside with high winds — is “pretty cold.” Yet she quips that, with the right clothes, it’s easier to keep warm in Antarctica than in the U.K., where it’s always wet.
Besides snug and waterproof clothing, Prince’s South Georgia essentials included crampons, snowshoes, an ice axe, a shovel, an avalanche probe, and an avalanche transceiver. She also needed advanced first-aid training — after all, there were no doctors around — as well as the skills to drive a power boat and the strength and stamina to wade through thigh-deep snow with a heavy pack.
Though mainly dried, canned, and frozen, the food there was “excellent,” she says, other than, perhaps, the “frozen cheese, which crumbles to pieces, and dried onions, which we nicknamed ‘devils toenails.’”
Sharing her living space with between three and 40 other scientists, technicians, and workers, Prince says she rarely felt lonely. (She even met her husband on Antarctica.) Yet she did much of her fieldwork solo, describing it as “magical” to live among albatrosses, petrels, penguins, and fur seals.
“The most rewarding things about my job have been getting to spend so much time working in environments that are beyond the reach of most people and getting to work with species that desperately need conserving,” Prince says.
Once, she extracted a Wandering Albatross chick that had somehow fallen into a White-chinned Petrel burrow and gotten “utterly stuck.” As she caught her breath with the muddy chick on top of her, she examined it and found little cause for hope. “One of its legs looked damaged, and it was a bedraggled mess,” Prince says. Yet, “when I came back the next week, the chick was amazingly still alive, and apart from being a bit muddy still looked healthy. It went on to fledge, and by now, I hope it has returned to the island and is breeding itself.”
Through it all, Prince refrains from calling herself a “cold-weather person.” “Sometimes,” she says, “it’s nice to swap the thermals for shorts and a bikini.”
Explorer extraordinaires
Among bird biologists, an adventurous gonzo streak can be par for the course. In the midwestern United States, for example, a researcher with a history of chasing radio-tagged birds in cars and planes once followed a thrush for seven straight nights before finally losing the signal somewhere in Canada.
Hite, meanwhile, spent six summers studying California Gulls at Mono Lake in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains, during which time he lived on an island inside a fake volcano, part of an abandoned 1950s movie set.
He also videotaped great white sharks in the Farallon Islands, counted oiled birds in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, and worked throughout Latin America and in Borneo prior to joining the Kaua’i Forest Bird Recovery Project. Once, while putting up swallow nest boxes in Venezuela, he took an hours-long break to watch a massive anaconda swallow a deer.
“To chase after jobs like this is exciting,” Hite says, adding that he likes birds, in part, because of their evolutionary connection to dinosaurs. “I think if you look closely, you can see the soul of a tyrannosaurus in almost every bird,” he says, “not just the hawks.”
All science involves plenty of grunt work. But there’s always the potential for stunning discoveries, as when ornithologists in Peru first glimpsed the brilliantly colored Inti Tanager, which in 2021 was designated as a new species. “The fact that there are places out there with bird species we haven’t found yet…that’s pioneering science,” says bird blogger and nature writer Nick Lund. “That, to me, is what ‘extreme’ is.”
Despite the myriad challenges facing them, the world’s birds at least have a few capable, unflappable humans in their corner.
This article was first published in the September/October 2022 issue of BirdWatching magazine.
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