Out of focus

What do I not see? What do I miss? And is it important? These questions often wonder around in my head. This is, I think, why I like listening to TED talks, reading books and watching movies. They make me aware of the things that I have been missing or they give me a new way to look at the things I thought I knew.

This is probably also why I like biology so much. Listening to a birdsong biologist will make me hear the songbirds sing. A wildlife ecologist will let me see the little forest paths that badgers and foxes make. And a botanist will make me smell the flowers. These songs, paths and smells are almost always around me, but invisible when I focus on other things, usually the irrelevant thoughts in my head. On the other hand, when I zoom out it makes me aware of the life that is continuously around me. Above me and below me. Especially when I feel worried or alone. And that makes all the difference.

Focus is good, but sometimes out of focus is even better. It makes me see.  

PhD project movie

 

And here it is. The movie showing what I am doing with my life these past 3 years :-)

 

 

Aviary observations

This weekend I had to work. But can I really call it work? The “work” I had to do, was observing six groups of six great tits, two times half an hour/day in the aviaries. Why? I need to know the dominance rank of each bird for a behavioural experiment and the best way to do this is to observe them, intensively. Who is displacing who?  What comes down to: I will land on top of you if you don’t move (never mind that there are plenty of other spots to land on). Who fights who? I will transform into a little airplane (body horizontal, wings spread) to intimidate you, hiss, peck, and chase and sometimes attack. With two balls of feather tumbling in the air as a result. And finally there is: who waits for who? Sure, I will wait with getting my food until you are finally done with selecting that one special mealworm you want (unless I can quickly steel one, of course).

I was looking forward to these days, sitting down and observing animal behaviour for hours. This is the reason why I decided at age 12 that I wanted to become a biologist in the first place. By just watching, observing, I always learn new things. For example, all the bird groups I observe are visually separated from the other groups, but they are continuously connected, vocally. When one great tit in a distant aviary gives an alarm call everybody flies off and freezes for about half a minute. This happens several times a day. Almost every time the cause for the alarm stays unknown. And yet, they still respond every time (which can be a little bit annoying when you are doing behavioural experiments). Also, I learned that magpies walking past the aviary are no problem at all, but contact calls from jackdaws are really scary. And finally, it is possible to become the most dominant bird in aviary and still be shy of creepy novel objects (like a plate with mealworms, apparently). But no worries, you just try to steel mealworms from everyone else (you are a dominant after all), until you build up enough courage to fetch them yourself.  

I could write many paragraphs about my observations of these two days (I will stick to three for now). How amazing it is that these juvenile birds know by themselves how to look underneath leaves, like how they would do in nature in search for caterpillars. How quickly they can catch a fly, accidentally flying into the aviary. And most of all, about the differences between the individual birds. There is that strange bird (spending most of his time messing around with pieces of dead leaves), that bully, that home improver, that gymnast and my all-time favourite: that bold bird. The kind of birds that seem to be studying us more than that we are studying them. And you know what else? You can also see all this by just looking outside into your garden.

What do I want to do with my life?

Being in my third year as a PhD I’ve had some time to experience the academic science system and frankly it has disappointed me a bit. In summary, I find it too time-consuming, inefficient and surprisingly dependent on either chance or “politics”. All this wouldn’t matter, because let’s be honest which job isn’t?, if the end result (a publication) will be worth it. But will it? Will it make the world a little bit better?

Thus, it comes down to “why am I doing research?”. Of course, partly because I like it. I love wondering about the workings of nature, studying them and hopefully answering my questions. But I am done with that process when I have written the first version of my paper. Yet, in many cases there is still a long road to go from then onwards.  And all that time I am thinking “I could be saving injured birds and hedgehogs now and my time would be so much better spend.”  

However, another big part of why I am doing research is because I like to share with people how marvellous the natural world closely around them is. To open their eyes, make them wonder, admire and hopefully respect, not only the big but also, the small parts in nature. Why is that blackbird singing so early this morning? Where did it sleep last night, who did he have to fight to get this singing post? Where did that snail on my back door come from? Did it travel far? Does it know where it is going or is it just going about at random? How long has that tree close to my back door been standing there? How many different people has it seen living in my house? How many other creatures, birds, ants, mice is it supporting?

All these creatures close around us are doing the same thing we are: living. And more often than not life is hard. Cold nights, hungry days, losing offspring, losing mates, losing homes and sometimes even losing limbs. But as soon as you come aware of the ducks bathing in the pond during a heavy rain storm, the sparrows taking a dust bath on a hot day and the see-lions soaking up the sun while lying on top of sharp rocks, you realize that life can be beautiful too.

Just like us, each living creature has a story and those are the stories I want to tell as a researcher.

The next question is: how?

Remember?

Two weeks ago I talked to a PhD assessor (part of a course, don’t ask) and he told me that I can better accept my faults than to constantly fight them. Well, maybe that is not exactly what he said, but that is how I interpreted it. Today I actually found out that one of my faults, my lack of any sense of direction, ended up to be quite useful. I was asked if I, by any chance, remembered to which one out of 200 nest boxes some juvenile blue tits were moved 5 months ago. Well yes I did.

Of course I study great tits, but blue tits also like our nest boxes and if they don’t get thrown out (or killed) by great tits they are very happy to nest in them. Most of our nest boxes are easy to find (after getting lost only 2 or 3 times). But some boxes are just impossible. They are not near a path, fence or large tree, they are just somewhere in the middle of the forest. Thus you have to make a bearing from a certain spot and keep walking in the right direction. Impossible.

One box was especially notorious for me: 718. It always took me more than 15 minutes to find it and at a certain point even more than half an hour. Constantly walking in circles, smaller and bigger ones and every time I would end up at 719. This was extra frustrating because 719 was very likely a blue tit nest and not a great tit nest (when there are decorative feathers in the nest it is usually a blue tit) and so it was not even a bit useful for me to end up there. And yes, when I opened the lit there were a couple of very small just hatched blue tit chicks. The next day the field technician asked me if I, by any chance, knew a blue tit nest that just hatched, because he was looking for foster parents for a couple of other blue tit chicks. Well yes I did.   

The only reason I remembered the nest box specifically still until today is because I have associated it with frustrating memories of aimlessly walking around in the forest. But now I feel quite happy. My wandering about without a sense of direction ended up to be useful on even two occasions. Ok, no lives were saved, fires prevented or anything significant in any other sense, but still this little event did make me think that possibly I really should start with just accepting my faults.

Actually, I did not remember the right box exactly. I said 718 instead of 719. But still.. 

Stay curious

Last week someone shared a saying with me: Always remember why you are doing something. Naturally, my first thought was “Well, yes, of course, how could you forget?” But throughout that week I realized I had forgotten.

I am lucky enough that I have a job that is the best job I could imagine for myself. Already as a kid I could lose myself in just observing a couple of jackdaws sitting on the fence outside, tadpoles organising themselves around a piece of bread or a spider restructuring her web after morning rain. Now I get to study nature. I get to wonder, marvel and story-tell about nature. But as with almost any job, it comes for a price.

If you want to continue in science than you have to be good in science. Or better said: people have to be convinced that you are good in science. But there is basically only one measure people have for this. Publications. And the best and almost only way to get good publications is to have a strong story combined with cool (significant) results. Unfortunately, getting cool results relies for a large part on luck and, with field biology at least, for an even larger part on the absence of bad luck.

You can try very hard, but still there can be many pitfalls on the way. Bad weather might strongly affect your study species, your technology might fail, your sample size might decrease because of unexpected predation and if you finally do manage to uncover something cool, someone else might have just beaten you to it. All very frustrating! Then you start to look around. How are other people doing? How are you doing compared to others? And that is exactly when it goes wrong. You start doing things to be better than others. Joy gets replaced with competitiveness and often followed by a feeling of failure. You forget the why. And I forgot the why.

Luckily there was the NIOO-open day to remind me again. Last weekend our institute was open for the general public and my colleagues and I got to tell about our work. During these short talks I became to feel enthusiastic again and the reason was because I did not talk about all the things that went wrong, but I talked about all the things that make my study  so interesting.

So now I will try to lose myself again. But in a good way. And I will try not to write publications to be better than others, but to write publications to tell stories.  To write out of curiosity.

The Novel Environment Test

I walked in the room and the first thing I noticed were the empty seats of the people still missing. “A good, I am not as late as I thought” (a thought that regularly crosses my mind). The people already sitting there did not look very at ease. Staring at the papers they had in front of them, quietly sipping their coffee’s, waiting for what is to happen. Again I was unexpectedly comforted, as I clearly was not the only person who had never been in this room, with these people, having to do those tests I never did before. So there we were, about 12 people, all PhD students in the exact same situation. But still we behaved different.

First, there was me. After carefully scanning the room I waited for the person, who looked like she was organizing the whole thing, to finish talking to someone. Seeing the piles of papers before me and all the other contestants having similar papers before them, I made the right assumption (it turned out)  that this person was here to give some to me. Next, I went for the coffee (naturally) which I spilled half over the table (naturally) and then selected a corner in the back to sit. But after a minute or two I realized that one of my ears was not working that well and that it might not be such a good idea to sit in the back. So I moved to the front. I dove into my bag to find a pen “Did I bring a pen? I must have brought a pen. How stupid would it be not to bring a pen to a written test!?”. I found a pen.

Second, I watched another contestant walk in. He was slightly late (seemed not at all bothered by it). He said (not asked) that he first quickly needed to go to the bathroom and left the room again. He came back and asked for a pen or a pencil (he did not bring a pen!) from the person in charge. He quickly selected a seat (next to me) and then asked me for today’s date. “Yes, it is the 10^th”.

All the other people entering (also a bit late) went by in a blur. I was thinking about whether I should be annoyed or jealous with the behaviour of that guy. Me being shy and carefully observing my surroundings and that guy being bold and (apparently) carefree. And then I suddenly realized it. “I am in a novel environment test!” “So, this is how my birds must feel during their personality test.” As a proxy for the personality of the birds in my study, we measure their exploration behaviour with the novel environment test. It is a strange awareness, suddenly feeling like a subject in your own research.

Juvenile great tits in a novel environment room (Kees van Oers)

When all the contestants were in, we could (finally) start with what we came here to do: the PhD assessment. We took the first form from the pile and started filling in our personality questionnaires.