In the voice memo, migratory bird researcher Rozy Bathrick sounds excited and hushed.
“I'm lying belly down among the sedge like in Labrador tea Moss,” Bathrick whispers into the phone, “Waiting for a black bellied plover to sit on a nest.”
Bathrick is a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Earlier this summer, she and a team of migratory bird researchers visited a section of tundra near the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta village of Chevak. Their mission was to put trackers on several different bird species to find out where exactly they like to spend their winters.
Bathrick said some migratory birds that summer on the Y-K Delta travel as far south as the tip of Chile, Argentina, or the Pacific Islands, and fly to and from the exact same spots in the western hemisphere each year. But other birds, like the ones Bathrick's team is researching, have been known to change it up — they can winter in different spots each year.
And so the idea of this tracking project is to look at where those birds are going and identify what might impact the route they take, or where they end up.
“And how different strategies might expose some species or some populations to these threats more than others,” Bathrick explained. “To identify places that are really important and valuable, and how we can protect and conserve those and areas where birds are flexible.”
For the past four years, the researchers have traveled to Alaska to spend summer months outfitting migratory birds with GPS transmitters that sit between their wings like little backpacks. Previously, they’ve focused on birds in the upper Cook Inlet and in Kotzebue. This year was the first on the Y-K Delta, based at the Old Chevak church-turned waterfowl research camp.
Each day, Bathrick said the seven-person team loaded up on coffee and oatmeal before spending the day walking the tundra, looking for nests of six Y-K Delta bird species in the low brush.
Once they found a nest of a species they were looking for, they hid a mesh net trap that could pop up once the bird sat on the nest. Then they would hide themselves, belly down in the tundra, until springing the trap to safely outfit the bird with a backpack transmitter.
But between backpack fittings, the team was also looking for a rare bird.
“We were out here to try to find the Long Billed Dowager and find them at the southern extent of their range,” Bathrick said. “We know they breed out here in really small numbers.”
The bird is a sleek brown-speckled creature with, as its name proclaims, a long straw-like bill. It’s rare to spot in this area. Bathrick said it became her unicorn, her Bigfoot.
Thus began a quest story.
“The most exciting part about the research is the not knowing, the mystery of what’s gonna happen, what we’ll be able to find,” Bathrick said.
Bathrick and the team of researchers searched for a Long-billed Dowager nest, but weren’t necessarily hopeful. They continued to trap and put transmitters on the other more abundant species they were able to find.
“It's easy to get frustrated or disheartened when the searching and the not finding goes on for days and days,” Bathrick said. “But you know, even just with a bit of distance from it, I feel such admiration and gratitude for the process to go with a certain hope to find something and to find it. But to also be a student of it the entire time, and to not know — really, just to not know.”
But in their first two days in the field, Bathrick and the team found a Long-billed Dowager nest. It was a big deal. Bathrick described it as an emotional moment.
“I've definitely cried at finding nests, especially for species that I've worked with for multiple years, that I feel an understanding with,” Bathrick said. “It just feels like such a gift when I'm able to find a nest.”
Bathrick sees the work of the sometimes hopeless search as a microcosm of a broader life philosophy of being teachable and open to what reveals itself.
“It's like there's some sign that there's something that wants to be known, like we should be knowing something here, and this is an opportunity to learn it,” Bathrick explained.
In her voice memo from the tundra, that anticipation is clear.
“Okay, [we’ll] see what happens,” Bathrick whispers. “We've got a good 20 minute cut off. So if she doesn't sit in 20 minutes, we'll pack it up. Wish us luck.”
As summer fades into fall, Bathrick said some birds are beginning their journeys south, soon to stop in other parts of Alaska and California. Come this fall, the researchers will watch through the transmitter backpacks how and where the birds make their winter home.
