Assateague Island -- A winter wind is blowing across this long, wild island. The trees creak under its constant assault, and wind-blown rain rattles the windows of Hungerford House, one of the six houses maintained by the National Park Service and used by naturalists and researchers.
Inside the small gray house, the noise goes unremarked. It's eclipsed by a wide-ranging, intense debate between Maryland ornithologist Dave Brinker and Montana equine researcher Jay Kirkpatrick.
The mood is philosophical and maybe a little bleak, as they wonder aloud if they're science's Don Quixotes: Is it even possible to protect wild animals against the inroads of technology and humans?
"As a species, people are arrogant," says Mr. Brinker.
"How do you change that?" asks Mr. Kirkpatrick, a reproductive physiologist who is studying Maryland's Assateague horses.
"One by one," says Mr. Brinker. "You work on your children, bring them up so they understand. I bring Gavin out here."
Gavin is Mr. Brinker's 4-year-old son. Three of his four Thanksgivings have been spent on Assateague, a family holiday celebrated around his father's avian research.
But Mr. Brinker's passion for birds goes far beyond educating his young son. It touches all the parts of his life -- family, career, free time. He earns a living studying the state's colonial water birds (that's colonial by virtue of living in groups; nothing to do with the Revolutionary War) for the Department of Natural Resources in Annapolis.
In that capacity he monitors the birds that flock to the state's shores -- weighing, measuring, counting and banding pelicans, terns and others, assembling and analyzing the data he gets from the field, writing papers and memos.
And for two years now he has stacked up compensatory time, vacation and the Thanksgiving holiday to weigh, measure, count and band the Northern saw-whet owl in Maryland, a little migratory raptor roosting so lightly on the state's ecology that it is almost invisible.
The time off -- some of it won with a promise to take a computer to Assateague so he can be linked to the office in Annapolis -- came to about five weeks this year. Five weeks of living in a tiny house in a clearing so remote that it can only be reached by a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Five weeks of going to bed at night, then getting up every three hours -- midnight, 3 a.m., 6 a.m. -- to check the nets he set up to snare the saw-whets. Five weeks of handling uncooperative owls in the middle of the night.
And he has no plans to stop -- he's taking the long view that lies at the heart of this and all other biological research.
"If you do this for 15 to 20 years, same methods, everything, you can tell what's going on with a population," he says with characteristically quiet intensity. "Before I started, nobody ever looked at saw-whets in Maryland. Since we started, we've banded 750 saw-whets. We started in '86, while we were still students."
Mr. Brinker and Kevin Dodge, a professor at Garrett Community College in Western Maryland, work together to chart the migration and breeding of the little owl whose proper name is Aegolius acadicus. The bird's primary breeding range is across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania; it also can be found down the spine of the South, the Appalachians.
When Mr. Brinker and Mr. Dodge catch the owls, they take notes, recording everything from the bird's weight to its feather pattern and the precise yellow hue of its eyes (for this, they use a card that resembles a paint sample). Then they put a federal bird band on one leg and release it back into the wild. The bird is seldom detained more than two hours.
It's easier than some of the water bird banding, Mr. Brinker says, because these owls are so small. They weigh about what a robin does -- 4 ounces or so. They fit neatly into the 6-ounce Donald Duck orange juice can he slides them into headfirst before putting them on the scale; neatly but not happily. Their little talons wiggle during weighing, and they make an annoyed-sounding pecking noise with their beaks.
But they don't seem to hold a grudge. After weighing, Mr. Brinker takes them out of the can, looks in their eyes, their ears (hidden on the sides of their heads under feathers but still quite keen: they can hear mice walking in the woods), under their wings.
It's difficult to determine gender with owls, because their genitalia isn't externally visible, but he records their wing span in his notes, and says sometimes he can tell from that (females are bigger).
The owls sit on his hand without too much wiggling and wing-flapping while he records their statistics. He holds their feet while they sit on his hand so they can't fly away; but sometimes, he says, they'll sit on the porch railing for a little while after he sets them free again.
"We're banding to monitor the continental population," Mr. Brinker says of his fall pilgrimage to Assateague. While he's netting and banding saw-whets in Assateague, Mr. Dodge is doing the same across the state in Garrett. Mr. Brinker's five weeks netted 28 owls; Mr. Dodge, who is still banding, has netted 90.
"Think of it as a jigsaw puzzle . . . You need to have at least 50 to 60 percent of the puzzle to see the picture. We have one or two pieces of this huge puzzle. So you sit here and work on migrants and say, 'What have I learned and where does it fit in?' Any little bit we can learn helps us because there's so little that's known."
Other bird experts concur. Richard J. Cannings, writing in "The Birds of North America" last year, describes the saw-whet this way: "Although the Northern Saw-whet Owl is one of the commonest owls in forested habitats across southern Canada and the northern United States, much remains to be learned about its populations, distribution, behavior and breeding biology."
Mr. Brinker's curiosity about saw-whets goes back to his undergraduate days. "I went to the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, not with the thought of being a wildlife ecologist -- the classes I chose led me there," he says. While a student, he worked at bird-banding stations.
After college, he worked for a consulting firm for seven years, advising clients about the environmental effects of utilities and mines. The experience was useful, he says in retrospect: "I was forced to look at different perspectives. I said, 'I'm in debt, I'm going to give it a try.' "
Now 40, he came to Maryland in 1985 to enroll in the University of Maryland's doctoral program for marine, estuarine and environmental sciences, completing the course work but not the thesis.
Money was running out and Gavin was on the way, so he went to work for the Department of Natural Resources on colonial water birds, a job he clearly likes. But something was missing.
Owls.
"Something about saw-whets," he says with a smile. "There was something about walking out on a cold, clear night to check the nets, and seeing swans. When I got down here, I really missed working at the raptor-banding station. So I just said, 'Well, nobody's ever tried this.' Nobody had ever banded in Maryland specifically for saw-whets. Some guys carry a shotgun out in the woods and go hunting. I used to do that. Now I do this."
If the owls he bands have traveled a long way, so has he. The son of a Wisconsin machinist, he has followed the migratory route the saw-whets take: out of the Midwest and down to a remote, enchanting wild strip of sand that shields two states from the Atlantic's fury.
"Before we did it here, no one knew that birds from Minnesota and Wisconsin were in Maryland. These birds weigh 4 ounces and go 1,000 miles. They breed in Garrett County. . . There are maybe 100 pairs in Maryland? We don't know. We only know of 10 . . . Nobody knows the population -- whether it's stable, whether it's going up or down."
A complete picture of saw-whet owls in Maryland is unlikely to be assembled any time soon. Mr. Brinker and Mr. Dodge at present band only in the winter, catching the owls as they head south. "There's only so much vacation time," Mr. Brinker says wistfully.
The state provides logistical support for his saw-whet research, he says: the nets, the truck, letting him stack up his time off and work a few days from Assateague.
His family is flexible about it; coming to Assateague for Thanksgiving, managing while he is away. His wife, Jan, has even helped supply the owl study by buying three dozen net lingerie laundry bags when they're on sale -- Mr. Brinker puts the owls in lingerie bags to keep them from flying away after he frees them from the net. (Anyone who thought science couldn't be amusing should picture lingerie bags jumping around in the Assateague woods.)
And he's determined, driven by academic curiosity and personal belief that such research is essential for human and ecological well-being.
"We're looking at extinction rates [for some animals] going up and up and up," he says in response to Mr. Fitzpatrick's remark that no one cares about things like threatened toads in Wyoming. "You can break off little parts of your car and if you break off enough of them, it will stop working. It's the same with ecosystems: you break enough little parts and it all comes crashing down."
The owls he and Mr. Dodge study in Maryland are part of the Appalachian ecosystem, one of many little puzzles that make up the larger, more complicated mountain mosaic.
And the conversation in the Assateague cabin turns philosophical again, as the two men talk about the intrinsic value of wildlife, how to measure it, why ugly Wyoming toads are just as valuable as a cute little owl like the saw-whet.
"I feel like I'm a sandlot team and we play Pittsburgh every week!" says Mr. Fitzpatrick. "All the values boil down to board-feet, heads of cattle, pounds of wool . . ."
There is a brief silence.
"Gavin saw a saw-whet owl . . . and he remembers," Mr. Brinker says reflectively.
And the subtext is unmistakable: His pursuit of his piece of the ecological puzzle is slow but sure, piece-meal but persistent. One child at a time, one owl at a time, one working day at a time, one vacation at a time.
Dail Willis, a copy editor for The Baltimore Sun, was the Ocean City correspondent last summer.