There is a permeable boundary between the inside and the outside of the house. The cupboards have mice, my shower has spiders, and last night, a Pacific Tree Frog hopped out from under my bed. It is exactly as I hoped—a place where decades of field biologists have come and gone, leaving little pieces of themselves behind and adding slightly more wear to the infrastructure. Maintenance issues are repaired piecemeal, and almost every item of decor is bird-themed.

In spring, the wind blows almost constantly through the Kern River Valley, rushing through the sweet gum outside my bedroom window and blending with the calls of the ever-present California Quail. There’s a specific spot just a minute down the road where I often see a flock foraging. And since this is rural California, I can stop and observe without any fear of causing a traffic jam.

The station supports a range of research projects across the region, and different scientists come and go to work on them. People head out for days at a time to more remote sites, then return with stories of scrambling through scree to find an endangered towhee subspecies or traversing hilly grasslands to conduct point-count surveys. I am assigned to several projects in the riparian forest located only a mile from the station, so I have the pleasure of fully unpacking my suitcase and leaving it empty for the next three months. 

The field work begins

The Kern River Preserve is not currently open to the public and accessing the site involves trekking through a cow pasture, climbing over a fence, and wading through a flooded road that the river swallowed after a recent flood. A large flock of Red-winged Blackbirds faithfully guards the boundary between pasture and forest, their constant vocalizations quickly muffled by the dense forest vegetation. 

Every year the SSRS runs a MAPS birding banding station, so my first few field days were spent clearing the net lanes. The nets go in the same locations every summer, but water reroutes, sediment builds up, and vegetation hides the old footpaths. We used GPS to navigate to each site, then armed with machetes, hand saws, and clippers, we cleared the lanes and trails to ensure birds and crew members would be safe during the upcoming bird banding days.

I am the only person on the crew that has never banded birds before, and my coworkers are excited to share their knowledge with me. One of the greatest pleasures in life is asking someone a series of questions about a topic and finding almost no end to the answers. My steady stream of questions barely scratches the surface of their collective knowledge. I hope one day to be there myself. 

First Day of Bird Banding

Let May 19, 2025, forever be known as the day I first held a songbird in my hands. I spent the first hour or so observing as my coworkers carefully followed the birding banding protocols—checking the nets every 30 minutes, methodically extracting the birds, and returning them to the central table for banding and mesasurement.

My primary role this season will be as an “extractor,” which is the role of detangling the birds from the net. When a bird runs into the net, it falls into one of four pockets, becoming tangled in the specialized material. It is then my job to determine which direction the bird entered the net and systematically remove wings, feet, and head until the bird is free. Some species seemed to fight this process more (American Robins and Red-winged Blackbirds), while others held completely still (most warblers).

I only extracted one bird my first day. A female House Finch. The process takes a certain amount of finesse, so I had to call for backup, and I mostly just held the bird and attempted each part of the body a few times before my coworker intervened. I am looking forward to developing this new spatial-resasoning skill.

FAvorite Nature Sightings

• Lesser Nighthawk: swooping (SO FAST) over the hills while I was hiking at sunset. The station director said they used to be more abundant in the valley, but their numbers have dwindled to the point of rarity.
• Lawrence’s Goldfinch: a brand new bird species for me!
• There are lots of Joshua Trees just a few miles east of the station, and they are full of massive seed pods (?)