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?