Late into my senior year of college, I called up my mentor for some graduate school advice. It was already that tenuous time when parents and professors begin demanding, “So, what’s next? Postponing responsibility with more school, or have you gotten a job?” All I knew for certain was that I wanted to study raptors (hawks, not dinosaurs), but I had no notion how, or where.
We mulled it over together on the phone. He recommended a few names: this professor studying kestrels here, this one studying eagles there. Nothing jumped out at me. Then there was short pause on his end of the line.
“How comfortable are you living without internet for a bit?” he asked.
“Oh sure, fine. I could do that,” I answered, not giving it much thought.
“Great!” he said. “That’s it then.”
A few months later, I was on a plane to the Falkland Islands.
To be fair, it was four planes. Nine hours to Sao Paolo, four to Santiago, another four to Punta Arenas, and two to Mount Pleasant. By the middle of the three-day journey, the butterflies in my stomach had jetlag. Sure, I’d traveled with my family before, from Hawai’i to Alaska, but never anything like this. Never had I decided the best thing for me to do was to dive headlong into a project I knew nearly nothing about, on an island, only reached by the occasional twin-prop or cruise ship, without cell service or internet, at the bottom of the world. So long, Ma!
Moreover, I had a job to do. I wasn’t there to sightsee, but to collect data and observations. Just before I left the States, an email came from my future advisor. “How’s that thesis proposal coming along?” he asked.
“Oh, the proposal?” I said, pulling up a blank document and trying to pretend this wasn’t the first time I’d heard of it. “Oh, fine, fine!”
That first draft was horrifying and naïve. What kind of field work could I expect to do in a field I’d never set foot in, on a bird I’d never seen? What on Earth had I agreed to? Luckily, before I had to write the second draft, a rowdy teenage gang of Johnny Rooks had taught me a few things.
I have trouble describing my study species even to fellow biologists. Phalcoboenus australis, known as the Striated Caracara, or more commonly the Johnny Rook, is a relative of the falcon, eats like a vulture, sounds like a gull, looks like a huge crow, and acts like a parrot at a picnic. They will steal your hat, your lunch, and your keys, untie your shoelaces, and destroy your ATV before you can turn around. They have no fear of cars, motorbikes, or airplanes. They’ve been known to perch on the wings of taxiing aircraft, waiting until they get to take-off speed, then peeling away gently without ever having to flap, as if it was all a great game. Other pastimes include penguin-bothering, jellyfish-poking, weathervane-balancing, and soap bubble-eating.
Johnny Rooks are up for anything, short of a rooster and his assortment of hens casually strolling within ten feet of a choice carcass. Why they run from a chicken and not a 100kg hog crunching on a similar chicken is (not) a subject of current research. They are little daredevils; they’ve been getting themselves in trouble with Falkland farmers since the 1800s, and they are never going to stop.
It’d be easy to say the Johnny Rooks taught me to poke life in the face and scream at it, but I’m not so direct. In the mornings in the camp, after a quick smoko with the islanders, watching two caranchos perched out beyond the sheep fence, I couldn’t feel I wasn’t at home. If someone offers you a faraway place, or a fascinating question, or great hat, you have to grab it. Go there, learn the answer, wear the hat (or rip it to shreds). Whatever tests you, scares you, inspires you–grab it in your talons and don’t let go! Only then can you really get at the answers, the core—the guts, if you will—to the study of life.
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