Seeing the forest AND the trees

Within half an hour of starting my new job, I knew I was in trouble.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of a truck driven by my new boss, travelling down an Alberta highway at 110 kilometers per hour. Every few minutes, without taking his eyes off the road, he would randomly (at least, so it appeared to me) toss out the name of another bird species.

“Hooded merganser.”

“Blue-winged teal.”

“Black tern.”

Most of these species were only names to me. Given a good bird book, a pair of binoculars, and at least a full minute with a clear view of the bird, I would probably be able to ID them. But IDing them based on a silhouette glimpsed for a second out the window of a moving truck…it didn’t take me long to conclude that my boss had to be superhuman. And also that my tenure at this job might be a great deal shorter than I had originally hoped.

Having (finally) finished my PhD this past winter, I’m now in the painful stage of figuring out what exactly I want to do with it. So when I was offered a job as a field tech for a wildlife consulting company in Calgary, I jumped at the chance. I figured that a decade of doing fieldwork for various degrees would equip me well for the job. Shows how much I know….

As a grad student, I spent all my time in the field completely focused on my study species (whatever that happened to be at the time). I’ve put in endless hours catching and banding individual birds, recording their behaviour, and monitoring their reproductive success. For me, fieldwork has always been narrow in scope, focused on learning every single detail about one very small part of the ecosystem.

Working as a consultant is pretty much the exact opposite: the focus is broad. No one is interested in the details of each individual bird; what clients want is the big picture. So instead of spending all my time identifying colour banded individuals, instead I’ve been frantically trying to learn to identify dozens of species by both sight and sound. (Given that more than 750 bird species breed in North America, you can imagine that the learning curve is pretty steep.)

And the broad focus of consulting extends beyond simply identifying species. In fact, perhaps the best example of the differences between grad school and consulting is an activity common to both: nest searching.

Grad students studying birds frequently have to find nests in order to measure individuals’ reproductive success. They need to know who an individual mates with, how many eggs it has, when those eggs hatch, how often (and what) the parents feed the nestlings, and how many of the babies survive and make it out of the nest.

Nest searching is also a common activity for consultants, but with an entirely different focus. Under the Migratory Bird Convention Act, companies undertaking construction activities during the breeding season are required by law to take steps to avoid disturbing bird nests. To do so, they hire consultants to map out the location of those nests, so they can be avoided during construction.

But finding a nest – particularly a grassland bird nest – can often take hours and hours of careful observation, lying in the grass and waiting for the birds to get so accustomed to your presence that they’ll bring food to the nestlings even though you’re close enough to see where they land. Often you’ll be sure that you have the nest pinpointed – but when you leap to your feet and peer into the suspect patch of grass, you’ll find nothing, and have to start from the beginning again. It can be an incredibly frustrating process, but it’s accepted as par for the course when you’re a grad student. And the feeling of satisfaction you get when you finally part the grasses and see the gaping mouths of baby birds begging for food makes it all worth it.

The problem is, in the real world, it’s usually not possible to spend a whole day finding one nest. As a consultant, you have a given area to search, and a hard deadline: at some point, construction will start, and you need to know where the nests are before then. So instead of pinpointing nest locations, you’re on the lookout for any sign of breeding in the birds you see – then you watch them for just as long as it takes to approximate the general location of the nest.

When I first started doing nest sweeps as a consultant, I found this incredibly frustrating. After many years of grad school, I’m used to taking my time, and discovering as much as possible about the birds (and nests) I encounter. Having to approximate nest location (not to mention the stage of the nest) and then move on immediately to the next one drove me nuts.

But the more I do this job, the more I realize that it’s a trade-off. I may not know every single detail about the birds I observe, but I’m also learning to recognize many species that I’ve never paid much attention to before. I can’t tell you exactly where each nest is or how many eggs it has, but I can make an educated guess about how many species are nesting in a given area. In fact, the more time I spend as a consultant, the more I like it. The work is challenging, but it’s making me a better birder and a better naturalist.

I can’t deny that I do still miss the detail-oriented focus of graduate fieldwork. But every once in a while, when it becomes necessary to know exactly where a nest is, I get to use those skills. And when I do, the moment of discovery is just as satisfying as ever.