RYAN CARLE COULD USE A NAP. Bleary and hunched on a boat dock, he sounds nearly defeated. “It’s feeling like a bit of a boondoggle,” he tells me, not much louder than Mono Lake lapping beneath us. Carle, science director for the nonprofit research group Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge, has gathered a small team of scientists in his tiny hometown of Lee Vining, California, at the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada, with a clear purpose: to catch phalaropes. They’ve been at it for a week. Nothing doing.
This morning they tried two new techniques. Carle set out in one boat with Margaret Rubega, a University of Connecticut ornithologist, to deploy a contraption built with an old window frame that Carle pilfered from his parents’ garage. The DIY device is meant to float and snare swimming phalarope feet in loops of fishing line.
I squeezed into the other boat, where Sydney Miller, a graduate student who studies the dainty shorebirds at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, tested a different innovation: She tossed a revolting hunk of frozen sludge over the gunwale—brine fly larvae and brine shrimp. “Your hands are going to stink for so many days,” Kiki Tarr, an ecologist at Oikonos, informed her. The hope was that the bait’s stench would draw birds near enough that Miller could net one while Tarr maneuvered the boat. But the phalaropes paid it no mind. The lake was lousy with the tiny invertebrates.
When everyone regrouped after a few hours, Carle’s eyes were red. The floating trap sank, he said, and he had swum to the bottom of the salty, alkaline lake to retrieve it. Back to the drawing board.
It is the first week of August, a period the team chose for good reason: Typically during this time, Red-necked and Wilson’s Phalaropes are fattening up to power their fall migration. They should be pudgy, slow—nettable. Instead, they’re so svelte that the whole enterprise seems hopeless.
The researchers aren’t sure why, but when it comes to phalaropes, there’s plenty that scientists don’t know. Filling those gaps is the purpose of the International Phalarope Working Group, which arose from a gathering Carle and Rubega convened at Mono Lake in 2019. The partnership aims to shed new light on key questions one might assume had been resolved already, such as how many phalaropes there are and where they travel during migration. This summer, the team attached the first radio transmitters to 15 Wilson’s Phalaropes, males whose devotion to protecting their nests in Saskatchewan made them relatively easy to catch. Only two of the tags have provided helpful data, so today’s aim was to tag birds at
