Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [75]
But a week or so after the rest of the crew arrived, a wildlife vet flew into camp, igniting a buzz among the nine of us, and not just because he had brought a new crop of newspapers and magazines. The main goal of the season’s research was to figure out where the region’s population of red-throated loons spent the winter. The vet’s job was to implant a satellite tracking device into the abdomens of a few red-throats. Provided everything worked correctly and the birds didn’t die in the next few months, the implant would reveal where the birds migrated, which might yield a clue to why their numbers had declined so precipitously. That day, we were going to trap the first bird. Because Joel knew we all wanted to watch the surgery, he gave us this day “off,” which meant we could linger around camp. We all knew that trapping and operating on these birds was risky. In previous cases, some wild birds reacted badly to the medication, abandoned their nests, or even died. With each individual bird seemingly important to the success of the entire species, the stakes were high and no one wanted to screw up.
At that point in the season, we each had a handful of nest dots on our maps. John had located one near camp, which gave us the first loon to trap that morning. We all trudged out to the tiny boomerang-shaped lake where we found the nest with one egg, the pair of red-throats long ago flushed and flown away. We watched from a tight circle while Joel unfolded the trap over the nest. It was a spring-loaded contraption about three feet in diameter, strung with cotton netting. He folded half of the trap back, against the push of the spring, and then kept the trap open with a stout nail threaded through the top of a plastic stake, which he hoped would hold in this waterlogged ground. Then he camouflaged the metal trap frame with sedge he tore up from the tundra around him. He unraveled string tied to the end of the nail which was wound on a kite spool, and then we all walked away from the nest, with the string unspooling behind us. We hoped the loons would return to the lake and the female would get back on the nest. Once she did, Joel would yank the string, triggering the trap to shut tight. Joel and one of the other biotechs waited behind a small mound for the birds to return; the rest of us walked back to the weatherport.
There was so much waiting involved in this work: waiting in the morning until the day’s plan had been decided, waiting to find a loon nest among the dozens of goose, duck, and swan nests we passed as we worked. We waited out rainy days in the weatherport so that we wouldn’t flush birds off their nests, exposing sensitive eggs to a cold rain, and we waited for each other, after a day surveying study plots downriver, to take the skiff together back to camp. But the disappearance of these birds brought a particular urgency to our work. So much basic information about them was unknown. No one knew their wintering grounds, what they ate, or what was causing their decline. And no one knew how much time might be left to figure it out. We felt we were working in the moment that would decide whether the red-throats survived or failed. And if they failed, one piece of the region would be lost, one species gone that was connected to all the other species in ways no one could ever fully grasp. One strand of the Delta’s story would unravel: A Yup’ik tale tells of two loons helping a blind man regain sight.
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