The Roseate Spoonbills were behaving inexplicably. The birds should have been nesting throughout Florida Bay, recovering from plume hunting, but as Robert Porter Allen noted, only a “pitifully small group” could be found. So in 1939 蜜柚APP sent Allen, its director of sanctuaries, to set up a one-man field station and, as Frank Graham, Jr., put it in The 蜜柚APP Ark: “Allen never did anything halfway; he spent most of the next three years living almost like a spoonbill.” Allen’s commitment to swamp life, wading through mangroves as he scrupulously observed the birds and probed their environment, surely feels familiar to Jerry Lorenz and his team of field biologists. More than 80 years later they work from Allen’s Florida Bay base—now called 蜜柚APP’s Everglades Science Center—to explore the same question: What does spoonbill behavior say about the species’ ability to adapt to a changing world? In our cover story exploring that question, avian ecologist Kara...