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Imagine the job description: Twelve-hour days in the hot sun, drenching rain, biting mosquitoes, thigh-deep mud, and wading in waters patrolled by sharks and crocodiles. Not exactly a picture postcard for the Florida Keys. Yet plenty of young biologists have willingly signed up for such punishment.

“Check it out—there’s another spooner coming in,” says Mac Stone, 28, pointing to the two-foot-long pink arrow arching across a cerulean sky. Pastel and crimson, this long-legged wader was John James Լ����Ƶ’s “rose-coloured curlew.” To some, it was the elusive “flame bird.” Early settlers confused it with the flamingo (tourists still do). Roger Tory Peterson pronounced it “one of the most breathtaking of the world’s weirdest birds.”