In a patch of piñon pines, Bianca Sicich, a graduate student at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, hides in a blind holding a string. The string is attached to the door of a homemade trap of PVC and wire that she’s baited with sunflower seeds and a few piñon nuts. She sits there quietly for hours, awaiting a flock of Pinyon Jays, a species critical to the piñon-juniper ecosystem's survival. If she’s successful in capturing birds in her trap, she will tag them with radio transmitters to follow their movements across large home territories. Through this and other studies, Sicich wants to learn whether Pinyon Jays will have enough food if piñon pines, the birds’ main food source, stop producing seed as the climate warms and drought intensifies...