“I’m not getting goshawk tingles,” I said, craning my neck to stare at the trees soaring up around me. “I’m getting a goshawk hard-on.”

Sunset at one of our campsites.

It was beautiful forest, perfect goshawk habitat, and I would like this to be a story about how we found dozens of goshawks living in it. But this is actually a story about how we spent eight grueling days in the field and didn’t find any goshawks at all.

Our first site was hard bushwhacking: heavy underbrush made every step a struggle and tumbled boulders hidden beneath a thick layer of moss threatened to roll ankles. In the afternoon we heard a male goshawk call, and over the next day and half we heard both the male and his mate call several times, but were never able to find them or their nest, no matter how many rocks we tripped over.

Soggy weather on the “Sunshine Coast.”

The weather turned wet and miserable, so we abandoned that site in favor of trying to re-locate one of the birds we tagged last year. We struck out there, too, unable to pick up even a trace of his signal. We moved on to a third site, where I had such goshawk tingles I was sure we would finally find a nest. But the beautiful forest was completely silent. Finally we turned to our last site, which has had goshawks for the past three years, one of which we tagged last season. Yet we couldn’t pick up the signal and none of the nests were active. Exhausted, defeated, and soggy, we retreated to the city for hot showers and the comfort of our own beds.