If you should ever find yourself eager to shatter the romance of playing in a rock band, think for a moment how many of your favorite musicians still have day jobs out of necessity. Waiter, preschool teacher, photocopier technician… no type of employment is too mundane or specialized to hold a struggling singer-songwriter and a guitarist or two, collectively or individually biding their time until their big break. Even a solid label deal and a few acclaimed records won’t fully liberate musicians from the grind the rest of us face each morning. Over the past six months for this publication alone, I’ve spoken to a whole foods grocery store clerk, a freelance graphic designer, an office temp, a coffee shop barista and a lab assistant – all of whom were noteworthy for what they got up to during the evening and weekends rather than their primary bill-paying occupation.

Jonathan Meiburg is fortunate enough to have it both ways. He is the frontman and songwriter in Shearwater, two duties he divides with close friend, multi-instrumentalist and Okkervil River bandmate Will Sheff. And he is also an ornithologist – more specifically, the world’s foremost expert on the South American Striated Caracara (phalcoboenus australis). Earlier this year he was a featured speaker for the Louisiana Ornithological Society and delivered the lecture “Looking for Johnny Rook: Unraveling the Biogeographical Mystery of the Striated Caracara in the Falkland Islands.” That isn’t to say that he doesn’t fret about paying the electricity bill from time to time; and though his kind of dual occupational satisfaction is hard to come by, it’s nevertheless heartening proof that life doesn’t always have to be a trade-off.

“ I flew in from Ecuador yesterday,” says Meiburg, sounding slightly exhausted. He only stepped off the Athens-Dallas flight, the final leg of his return journey, less than an hour prior. “We were camping for two months. I was a research assistant on a research project involving Galapagos Hawks. The thing about these hawks - like everything in the Galapagos, it’s weird and unique – is that they have a breeding system where it’s one female between one and eight males. The males don’t compete at all. They guard the young and tend to the nest. Things like that aren’t very common in nature. We’re looking into a lot of different factors that might influence why some females take on more males than others.”