So, turns out science is hard. I know this, no one goes into research thinking it will be easy. We all know the stories of the great discoveries that were accidents or that took 3 gazillion attempts before things worked. But somehow it can still come as a shock whenever you start a new project, especially on that revolves around free-living birds that do things. Unfortunate things like not even showing up for the behavioral trial.
Part of the problem is that once something has been figured out, it's not exciting or novel anymore, so you can only get so much mileage out of it. We all know that replicating findings is important. But, if that is all you do... you are going nowhere fast.
So you try something new, something exciting, something that, if it works, would get you a paper in a nice, highly-ranked journal, or act as preliminary findings for a new grant. But whenever you try something new, you're taking a chance, rolling the dice, and hoping it doesn't come up craps.
A friend of mine compares research to baseball, if you are batting .300 you are doing pretty darn good. But if you think about it that means you are failing more times than not, more than twice as many times actually. So once again, success in science is as much about the willingness to persevere in the face of failure as it is about being able to succeed. Kind of like a lot of other things.
