It's a rainy winter day in Providence, but in Steve Reinert's mind, it's springtime on Block Island. He's just placed a small aluminum band on the leg of a Kentucky warbler - a small yellow and green bird that is rare in these parts - and a friend takes a picture of Steve and the warbler before they release it to fly away.

Steve keeps that picture tacked to the wall above his desk so that he can remember that day, when the mist nets were full of birds, and he gingerly carried each one to the lab to be weighed and banded before releasing it back into the wild. It was more than 5 years ago, but even without the picture, Steve would still remember the warbler. He remembers the Summer Tanager they banded that day, too.

By day, Steve is an information systems and research support manager at Lifespan, the corporation that owns and operates many of Rhode Island's largest hospitals. Clinical trials generate a massive amount of data. It's Steve's job to clean, arrange, and make sense of that data. When he's lucky, Steve is able to get involved during the planning stages of a clinical trial, so he can help see a project from inception to completion. Usually, though, researchers send him a tangled mass of numbers from an already-completed trial and Steve spends his days sorting through it.

In his spare time, Steve is a freelance ornithologist specializing in coastal water birds. Steve's isn't the typical story, in which he loved birds from an early age and followed this passion through his teens and into adulthood. He did love birds when he was young, for a time. But birding was soon replaced by an equally enthusiastic love of rock collecting, then coin collecting, basketball, and finally ping pong. In fact, when Steve entered the University of Rhode Island as a freshman in 1971, his declared major was geology, a remnant of his rock-collecting years.

It wasn't until his parents moved from the suburbs to Portsmouth, RI, that Steve rediscovered his former love of birds. His father had set up a bird feeder, and during his visits home Steve watched many species of water birds come feed in their backyard. Everything came back. "It was like falling in love overnight," he says. "It was unbelievably powerful."

He quickly changed his major to zoology and set out to study birds. His first job out of graduate school was as a research assistant for Frank Golet, an ornithologist and professor at the University of Rhode Island. Golet was studying the habitat relationship of birds in salt marshes in the East Bay.

Steve's job was to visit each of the study's 6 sites in Barrington, Tiverton, Warren, and Swansea, and count birds. He counted larger bird species by nailing two-by-fours to trees and climbing them with binoculars and telescopes. He counted smaller species by identifying "transect strips," or straight lines at predetermined locations in the marsh, strapping on big rubber overalls, and slowly walking those lines through the mucky soil. Sometimes the strips would lead him right into a shallow pond. Steve just kept walking, all the time taking notes on his clipboard.

It was while he was a researcher for Golet that Steve became interested in the red-winged blackbirds that live in Barrington's Hundred Acre Cove salt marsh. By Steve's own admission, red-winged blackbirds are "very common birds." Six to eight inches long, the males are solid black with a shock of red on each shoulder, and the females are striped dusky white or grey. Steve found, however, that the red-winged blackbirds living in this salt marsh were no ordinary blackbirds.

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Because the marsh floods each month with the tide, this population of blackbirds had evolved a special nesting cycle to prevent their young from drowning each summer. Steve is a fastidious person; if he was going to make a major ornithological discovery, he was going to get it right. He put on those rubber overalls and visited each of Hundred Acre Cove's 80 red-winged blackbird nests every single day during breeding season for 3 consecutive years.

He started this project in the early 1980s, but he still views it as his "most serious ornithological contribution." The results of the research are finally going to be published this year, in the Cooper Ornithological Society's "Studies in Avian Biology" Monograph series.

The job at URI integrated Steve's two primary passions, birds and research. Besides, it was fun. "This was my job, to be out in the field every day," Steve still muses 20 years later. All the pieces were in place. Except that with a master's degree and 3 years of experience, Steve's salary was only $11,000 a year. He had recently become a father, and the meager pay was not going to cut it.

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So in 1983, Steve went to work for Rhode Island Hospital cardiologist Dave Williams. Williams was one of the first physicians in the country to perform a balloon angioplasty, a procedure in which clogged arteries in the heart are opened with a tiny balloon-tipped probe. He needed someone to track the progress of patients who had had the procedure, enter and manage data, and write academic papers on their findings. From ornithology to cardiology seems like a move from one world to another, but the research methods and the statistical tests were all familiar.

And did the physicians at Rhode Island Hospital wonder what a zoologist was doing in their midst? "If anything," Steve recalls, "with a masters in Wildlife Biology, I was overqualified for the job." His intent was to return to full time ornithology at some point, but his new job had a lot of stability and good benefits, so it was a good fit at the time. Needless to say, Steve never did return to full time ornithology. Nevertheless, since 1983, he has published almost a dozen papers and spearheaded several projects that have helped shape New England's ornithological landscape.

For more than 10 years - from the mid-eighties to mid-nineties - Steve worked with the Lloyd Center for Environmental Studies in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, to design and implement a long-term bird monitoring program. After assembling a detailed habitat map of Allen's Pond, a tidal pond and salt marsh bordering Buzzards Bay in South Dartmouth, Steve laid transect strips, carefully chose trees, and nailed two-by-fours to their trunks for climbing - the same way he had as a researcher for Golet at URI.

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Every other week for 15 years, Lloyd Center staff walked those strips and counted sparrows and other small organisms that their boot steps flushed up. Every other week for 15 years, they sat in those trees with telescopes and binoculars and counted larger bird species. The first 5 years of that data is assembled in "The Birds of Allens Pond: Ecology of a Coastal Massachusetts Avifauna," published by the Lloyd Center in 2001. The paper's conclusion, though reserved and dispassionate in tone, is nevertheless clear: "the maintenance of healthy estuarine bird populations in the face of human-induced pressure on the coastline will depend on conservation efforts geared toward habitat preservation, and management efforts geared toward optimizing habitat quality."

After wrapping up his work with the Lloyd Center in 1996, Steve met Elise Lapham, a lively and regal woman in her eighties who, along with her daughter, Helen, ran the Block Island Banding Station. Mrs. Lapham established the Banding Station on her property in 1967, following a long tradition of birders on Block Island. The Laphams set up a series of mist nets, so called because their texture is so fine that they look like mist, and unsuspecting birds fly into them.

During the fall and spring migrations (September/October and May), Banding Station volunteers make rounds each hour to collect the birds that are trapped in the nets. The birds are transported to the Banding Station laboratory, where they are weighed and recorded, and a small aluminum band is placed on their leg before they are released.

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When Steve first went to the banding station, what he saw was enough to make his data-driven brain go haywire: shelf after shelf of 3-ring binders, each painstakingly hand-labeled with the year, dating back to 1967. Eighty-thousand records, on paper. Steve offered to become the banding station's volunteer data manager. Mrs. Lapham accepted. It took 7 years, but Steve wrote a program into which volunteers entered all of that data.

When I asked Steve if I could visit the banding station, he promised, "you'll come back a birder." Kim Gaffett, the principal bander at the Station, picked me up at the ferry. Kim is a round woman with kind blue eyes; she smiles easily and often. She speaks softly, but she has a lot to say. Like everyone else at the Station, Kim is a volunteer. She has several jobs, including running a print shop and driving the Block Island school bus, but she says she plans her life around banding. "People know me. They know, May, September, and October, I'm not doing anything else. Banding is my priority."

Steve was right - the enthusiasm was contagious. Kim knew she had something special when she pulled a small yellow and black bird out of one of the nets, but she wasn't sure of the species. She called the whole family into the lab; Mrs. Lapham, now 91, her daughter, and granddaughter each pored through bird books until it was settled: a mourning warbler. Kim handed Mrs. Lapham the pen so she could do the honors; she carefully recorded the serial number on the bird's new band, its weight (13.2 grams), its age (after hatching year), and its wing length (57 mm).

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Mrs. Lapham, wondering how many mourning warblers had been banded this season, pulled out a mimeographed tally sheet and ran her wrinkled finger down the handwritten columns: this year there were 2, last year there were 3; in 1970 there were 13.

The first paper describing the birds collected over the Banding Station's 30 year history was published by the Rhode Island Natural History Survey in 2000 as part of the book The Ecology of Block Island. But before the data were entered into the computer and analyzed, moments like these, with Mrs. Lapham hunched over a tattered binder and a mourning warbler in Kim's hand, were the only time anyone saw these numbers.

One theme that runs through Steve's love of birds is a love of something more: data about birds. This is the intersection of his hobby and his day job: "the drive in me to do research.is very strong.whether it be medical or ornithological." So strong, in fact, that Steve must often use his spare time to write about birds instead of actually going birding. "I don't really understand it," he says. "I just know I'm not happy unless I'm working on a project." This is how Steve does it; his love for it is so powerful, he just has no choice.

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The day I went to the Banding Station, Kim let me release some of the birds. I held a robin in my hand and let him fly away; he was stronger than I expected, and beat a path out of my hands in a hurry. The magnolia warbler had a lighter touch, fluttering first to the left, then to the right, on its way to the nearest tree. It's funny to think of these graceful creatures as numbers, but it's the numbers that help Steve honor the complexity and splendor of their migration and breeding patterns.

It's the numbers, too, that ensure the birds' survival. When Steve writes that a "link in a chain of stopover habitats" is threatened by "unrelenting development pressures," he can say so with the proof of solid data behind him. So when the mourning warbler flies out of Mrs. Lapham's wrinkled, wise palms, it's a little safer because number-crunching ornithologists like Steve.

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