The Killdeer and the Caboose

My pickup truck is creeping along the Interstate 5 Freeway toward downtown Los Angeles on an early morning in late June, when the sky’s yellow glare promises a climb from comfortable temperatures to the humid upper 80’s by noon.  I take the Soto Street exit and drive past abandoned warehouses and cement plants before turning right onto Washington Boulevard and right again into a construction yard.  I wave to the security guard, who gives me a nod and a smile, and I wind my way through an obstacle course of scrap metal and railroad ties to a train yard.  It’s here that new track will be laid for part of the Alameda Corridor, a multi-billion dollar rail project to prevent trucks that haul shipping containers from clogging already-jammed surface streets and freeways.  At the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, shipping containers will be unloaded from vessels from all over the world onto rail cars, transported by rail to Union Station, then sent in hundreds of directions to landlocked parts of the country.  And my job is to help the project stay on schedule by discouraging birds from laying eggs in the construction zone.

As I peruse my surroundings—on my left a series of active train tracks, and on my right the Los Angeles River, once mighty during rainy seasons and flowing free, but now restrained and flowing sluggishly in a concrete channel—I think about my many years in college studying for a degree in wildlife biology.  I’d dreamed of working someday among the dense foliage of the Amazon rainforest, listening to a cacophony of tropical birds.  After visiting East Africa, I also perused a career with exotic birds of the Serengeti, such as the sand grouse, which soaks up water from rain puddles on its feathers and flies many miles to its thirsty chicks in their desert nest.  I don’t recall, among those imaginings, the train yards of East Los Angeles.  But the work pays the bills and allows me to visit those and other beautiful places on my vacations.

I’d ordinarily assign this job to my field assistants, but I scheduled a few field days for myself because I’ve always been fascinated by trains.  I may not be a famous wildlife biologist, but if my 8-year old self could see me today, she’d think this job was really cool!  I lived my first 17 years in the San Fernando Valley, half a block from the tracks where freight trains passed a few times a day.  I’d run with excitement and my younger sisters and friends to greet the train when we’d hear that loud slow horn, and watch, captivated, as the many rail cars clickety-clacked past us, some brown and hollow, others with yellow tanks for gasoline, some with the precursors for today’s shipping containers before they became so popular for overseas and cross-country trade.  I remember how we counted the cars and waited eagerly for the caboose man, who’d toss us a handful of shiny-wrapped cherry, lemon, orange and lime lollipops.  Today’s mothers would have feared the sweets weren’t safe, or that the caboose man would return later for more than our happy faces, but I’m happy I grew up in more innocent times.  We’d savor that candy and the caboose-man’s generosity with sticky smiles the rest of the day.

Project foreman and a biologist examine the Alameda Corridor project. Photo by Nathan Mudry.[/caption]Even today, I marvel when a freight train passes by, and wonder about the many places it may have been—the flower-decked craggy slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the black star-spangled night of the vast Mojave Desert, the gloriously eroded cliffs of the northern California coast.  And I wonder how many smiling and waving children it rumbled past when it snaked through the numerous large cities and small towns on its route.

I park my truck and reach behind the seat for a hardhat, orange vest, and binoculars. The vest and hardhat, and the requirement that I stay at least 20 feet from the active train tracks, are part of the guidelines of a 3-hour safety session I was required to attend before I was allowed to work around active train tracks.  I also grab a clipboard with a data sheet and a map to record my bird observations in the train yard.

I begin walking back and forth across the area where the new track will be placed.  It’s about 50 feet wide and ½-mile long and consists of newly deposited chunky gray gravel, the kind you see between railroad ties and that train folks call “ballast.”

I’m looking for eggs of a bird called a Killdeer, classified as a type of shorebird, though it’s not often seen near the beach.  Killdeer aren’t very picky when selecting a place to nest, laying three to four speckled eggs on the ground in a circle well camouflaged among bits of rock or gravel about the size of railroad ballast.   As you may imagine, within this jungle of concrete, the East L.A. Killdeer Gang was quite happy with the perfect nesting habitat provided by the Alameda Corridor project.

Killdeer are accustomed to humans and our machines and aren’t easily disturbed.  In fact, I’d found a nest the previous week between two active tracks only 10 feet apart.  Trains pass nearly every hour on both sides of the nest, and the Killdeer sitting on her eggs doesn’t seem to mind.  The nest probably has fewer predators than the nests in more exposed areas.  But I’m not sure if the fluffy brown-and-white chicks that hatch 26 days after the eggs are laid will make it safely over the tracks and eventually down to the relative safety of the L.A. River.

Killdeer aren’t an endangered species and in fact are very common, but in 1916 a federal law called the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) was enacted in response to widespread bird hunting and egg collecting.  Back then, instead of boring your dinner guests after the meal with a DVD of your vacation videos, you’d show them the eggs and nests you’d collected during your travels.  And women visitors likely arrived wearing the latest fashion rage—ungainly hats with tall plumes of feathers.  Some hats were even oh-so-romantically decorated with entire dead birds.  So environmental activists just prior to the Roaring Twenties petitioned Congress for legislation to protect bird populations that were declining because of these fads, and the MBTA is still enforced today.

The MBTA, as well as sections of the California Fish and Game Code, protects Killdeer and all other birds native to the United States, as well as their eggs and young.   So, when the first Killdeer nest was reported, the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority hired my company, a biological consulting firm, to monitor the construction zone and to encourage the birds to nest outside of it.  The construction crew would violate the MBTA if they destroy one or more eggs while laying the rail line.  Nests without eggs aren’t protected, so my field assistants and I try to find a nest before a Killdeer mom lays her eggs.  We rough up the ballast and sticks around the nascent nest to convince the bird to find a safer place, outside the construction zone.

But the birds aren’t easily discouraged.  Despite our daily efforts, we found 17 Killdeer nests with eggs that summer.  Fortunately, only about half were within the construction zone, and we surrounded each of those with yellow “Caution” tape and instructed the construction crew to stay clear until the eggs hatched and the baby Killdeer, which can run at the speed of a slow freight train when only a couple hours old, have departed with their parents for safer habitat.

This morning, I watch a Killdeer about 200 feet from me for several minutes to see if it will sit on a nest.  Because the eggs blend in so easily with the surrounding substrate, nests are difficult to find unless you see the parent sitting on it.  And Killdeer are very discreet about sitting on a nest if a potential predator, which is how they see a human, is nearby.  If you’re near its nest, a Killdeer parent will often pretend it has a broken wing to lure you toward it, a potential easy meal, and away from its nest.  The bird I’m watching doesn’t sit down, and when I walk near it, I’m not treated to a broken-wing performance that would suggest a nest is nearby.  The Killdeer eventually flies over the chain-link fence toward the trickles of the L.A. River below.

It’s about 11:00 am and the L.A. haze is doing little to cool the air.  I’m nearly at the end of my survey area and I haven’t found any nests after checking the one between the train tracks.  Trickles of sweat are coursing down my temples, and the ballast a hundred feet ahead is shimmering in heat waves.  So I pause to watch a long, slow freight train approach, its horn uttering a lonely call that awakens the child within me fascinated by trains.

I’m about 40 feet from the track, about the same distance I stood waiting as a kid for that caboose.  As the engine car approaches, the train operator leans out its window and waves at me, a small bottle of spring water in his hand.  I wave back and smile, but when he waves again with the bottle, I realize he wants to toss it to me.  I run forward and cup my hands together, just as I did when trying to catch those lollipops nearly 50 years ago.  As I wave back and yell a “Thank You!,” crack the seal and take a long swallow, I wish he knew my gratitude was for a lot more than a cool drink of water on a hot day.