In Praise of Failure

Yesterday afternoon, we acknowledge reality that our 2022 study of shoebill foraging behavior was not going to succeed, owing to an awkward lack of shoebills. Specifically, after I flew halfway around the world and we successfully acquired shared use of a Uganda Wildlife Authority boat...and after we combed all the habitats within 20-30 km of our operations base, we were stymied. For three days at the beginning of our boating period, we'd found a pair and got a few observations, but the past two weeks had been utterly fruitless. We could continue to search for the remaining ten days of October, but hope had fizzled. Kenneth was a long way from his young family for what? I was hemorrhaging cash (boat fuel, housing, ranger pay, etc.) for naught. At some point one must acknowledge that it's time to throw in the towel.

What is failure but lack of success? We'd arrived in high optimism that we'd get lots of observations of shoebills foraging and somewhat more tempered hope that we'd also get video records of siblicidal brood reduction. But two factors have scuttled these dreams. First, the water levels were already very high and rising as the rainy season lived up to its name all up and down the Nile, with upriver drainages feeding generously to Lake Victoria, Lake Albert, and the rest of the Nile system. Shoebills hunt at the edges of swamps and when the waters rose the whole swamps had lost their labyrinthine tracery of papyrus and bulrush edges. Second, the fact that the birds were breeding turned out to be a minus, not a plus. While it's true that one must have breeding to have siblicide, it's also true that these solitary-nesting and secretive birds were not telling us where. Confronted with vast tracts of very wet habitats that also harbored deadly threats (mainly hippos, Cape buffaloes, and Nile crocodiles), my zeal for mucking around hoping to find a nest -- any nest -- where the chicks were just hatching got soggy fast.

Hashing through our options, consensus quickly centered on one solution: come back in the dry season and kiss off the siblicide study. The little Cains have been slaying the little Abels for millions of years without my cameras: let them sin in peace!

I write today about failure per se for several reasons, primary among them being that nobody writes about it enough. We claim to learn from our mistakes, but generally prefer not to dwell on the unpleasant. What signal does that give for young researchers? That "successful" researchers are the ones with the knack, some amorphous superpower that delivers victory after victory. I remember one of my first graduate students marveling when he learned that I revise every manuscript through MANY drafts: he'd assumed my first drafts were polished! The reality was that I numbered my drafts, so I was able to tell him that he had just read the 33rd version.

I wish to posit instead that failure is like ignorance, both being valuable but getting a bum rap. Ignorance is the foundation of curiosity: we don't know why shoebills have goofy faces, but we desire to. I remain both ignorant and curious. Importantly, I'm a bit less ignorant now than I was during the flight eastward, but the much-desired kozmic convergence that might have filled my notebook with bushels of data to analyze failed to materialize. Therefore, I failed. Big whoop. As hmmmmm a "seasoned" researcher, I shrug. If this problem had been an easy one to solve on the first try, it wouldn't have lain fallow for centuries waiting for me. And it will wait a bit longer.

But isn't this expensive and humiliating? Expensive, yes. Humiliating, no. John Prine liked to say, "If you make a guitar mistake when playing the first verse, be sure and duplicate it on the second verse: the audience will call it style!" Field biologists don't need style. We ooze style by being frumpy, sweaty, and such. To quote another musician, Dolly Parton said "It takes a lot of money and effort to look this trashy." David Attenborough knows her secret. So it's not even humiliating to fail. This might have been a quick-and-dirty success, but now I will just relabel it as a Pilot Study and begin planning the dry season encore.

So, was anything worthwhile accomplished so far? Yes and no. I have seen something of Uganda. I have gotten to know (and like!) Kenneth Tumusiime and various other Ugandans. I have met the whale-headed bird, albeit briefly. I know its habitat. And I think I know why it has that crazy-ass bill. The operative word in that last sentence is "think." Without data, I can only speculate. But the answer currently in my head is a siren call and, like Odysseus, I am lashing myself to the mast to avoid the temptation. It is not good to fall in love with one's own first draft

I once published a short story about a field biologist who receives The Perfect Answer to his question and is sorely tempted. He was studying great blue herons at the time (and he was designed to resemble me because I didn't want someone suing me for pernicious satire!) when the birds in his study colony walked over to his observation blind and revealed that they spoke fluent English. They did the corny old courtship displays for tourists (like him), but he'd been out there collecting worthless data for several years and they felt sorry for him. Accordingly, they'd decided to give him a 24 hour Ask Me Anything session, revealing the real lowdown on their behavior. Ecstatically, he tape recorded them until the time limit expired and went home intoxicated with the papers he would write...until he realized he had NO DATA whatever. He had ANSWERS galore, from the ultimate authorities, but he couldn't very well write how he'd gotten them (they had no intention of speaking to anyone else)...he only had "voices" on tape. His moral dilemma concerned whether it would be justifiable to invent bogus "data" to document what he knew to be Truth.

In the end, he realized that he could not cut corners with dry-labbed pseudo-data for one very simple reason: the birds may have lied to him.

That fiction was, of course, a parable about the brilliant insights our hominid brains like to synthesize, the siren calls and self-congratulatory nature of hubris. But pride goeth before the fall. So I will return to Uganda in a year or so, picking a time when the shoebills are not sullen and mutinous, and I'll try to see what they think of my hypothesis.

Finally, if there are any graduate students out there reading this post, be not discouraged by initial failure. Indeed, get used to it. And if you ever cross paths with a field researched who is not intimately familiar with disappointment, be wary. Be very, very wary...and do not, under any circumstances, collaborate with him/her!