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It’s pitch black when I arrive at 5:30 a.m. at the Lewisville Lake Environmental Learning Area, a sprawling, 2,600-acre nature preserve about twenty miles north of Dallas. After I make contact with my party, the seven of us caravan in our vehicles, bumping a mile or so down a gated gravel road that twists deep into the woods, where we park by a meadow. Doused head to toe with bug spray, I put on a borrowed headlamp and fall in line behind my companions, stalking silently through fields of waist-high grass and wildflowers and trying to avoid low-hanging branches, fallen logs, and armadillo holes in the predawn darkness.The secret mission I’ve joined on this May morning has one goal: to capture and study painted buntings—the brilliantly…

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