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.

The scientific poster roller coaster

My first scientific poster is finally finished after days of hard work. Or so I thought, because after version 5 I was not so convinced anymore. ..

I started quite excited. My chance to tell my story. Little did I know that posters are not about stories. Posters are about pretty pictures. And although I am a great fan of pretty pictures, and some of them can tell great stories, the average scientific poster picture can not. “But how will people learn my stories when my posters are mostly filled with pretty pictures?” “People won’t even look at your poster if it is not filled with pretty pictures.” “Stupid people!”

Being very honest, I know I do exactly the same with everyone else’s poster, but it still was not an easy thing to accept. And starting a rally at scientific conferences putting up banners saying that we should actually really start reading the posters that everyone has worked so hard on, seemed a bit more effort than cutting down my story and putting in some pretty bird pictures.  
Working with cute little birds, it was not so hard to find some pretty cute little bird pictures. However, I also had to start with removing parts of my story a.k.a. “killing your darlings”. Luckily I have a supervisor (I will not mention names on request) who has much less trouble with this than I have, at least when it concerns my poster.  So, after having defended the genius thought that was behind every single sentence, I agreed to take them out. And of course.. the poster looks so much better now. But I am still seriously considering handing out little business cards, secretly having written my whole story on the back of them (and having a pretty bird picture on the front, obviously).

Poster done, just 2 days for the absolute deadline. Like it suits a real PhD student. This would not be a problem, if it were not so that a poster is generally most effective if it is also printed on paper (or any material alike). The two main reasons of being “casually late” were:  1. Spending time on constructing an awesome story that in the end got reduced to 3 sentences. 2. Really not wanting to have to put the word  “preliminary” on my poster. But after a weekend of going through possible methodological literature about possible software packages that could maybe be appropriate for my data analyses and knowing my computer will very likely crash trying to conduct any of these analyses, I finally admitted to myself I could not finalize months worth of research within 24 hours. 

So here I am without a complete story and without definite results. However I have a beautiful scientific poster and I think that when even a lawyer friend of mine (again, I will not mention any names on request) can correctly reformulate the scientific conclusions (preliminary as they might be) you can call a poster, at the very least, successful. 

And here is a pretty bird picture: 

 Photo: Koos Dansen

Cheers!

Office dreams

You might wonder wonder when I am going to talk about my research again, I am getting to that. But not now. For now, just a little "work observation":

Last week I wanted to tell you about two house sparrows that were fighting in front of the window of my NIOO-office (so far the work related part). Some downfeathers swirled downwards, that was what caught my attention. And a moment later, two little balls of feathers tumbling around eachother, heading towards the grass. Then one had a hold on top of the other, the next moment it was the otherway around. And when one bird flew away, the other would follow him. Minutes long it continued. When 15 minutes nothing happened, and I was thinking to myself why those little birds would be so eagerly fighting this time of year, they would show up again and do everything once more. That was the moment I decided for myself that they were not fighting. They were playing. An improbable thought, but one that fits much better in a field of wild growing flowers, between a flock of hyperactive juvenile goldfinches and next to a bold scrounging great tit.
Just because..

"What some folks call impossible, is just stuff they haven't seen before."*




*What Dreams May Come

Heroes

Another great thing of being a scientist is that you are sometimes asked to speak on fairs. The Dutch Bird Fair to be exact. And why is this so great you may wonder? Well, it is the place to meet your long-time idols (if you are a bird-person).

We started building up our little stands, early in the morning. The day began windy and dark grey with some rare rays of sunlight. Geese were flying over and crows were calling. Luckily the fair took place in a very beautiful nature area, the kind of nature that is magnificent in any form of weather.

Our team for that day consisted of six people. Two of Vogeltrekstation (Bird Migration Station) and four of the NIOO (Netherlands Institute of Ecology): Pieter, Berber, Rinse, Peter, Nicole and me. And I think we were a great team, but how can you not be if you all are fascinated with birds? My presentation was scheduled at the end of the day, so I could help out with the stand and our game for almost the whole day.

Yes, we had a game. The ‘caterpillar catching’ game. Not so much fun as the ‘geese migration’ game, I have heard from a certain someone (we will definitely be trying to work that in for next year), but it was still a pretty cool game. Three kids can choose if they want to be a great tit chick in a warm, normal or cold spring and they are dressed accordingly:  yellow bib, black necktie and a black head with added sunglasses for the ‘warm’ chick and an added woolen hat for the ‘cold’ chick. Sometimes even the occasional parent jumped in to participate.
                The goal is to catch a caterpillar being pulled up a string by only using your ‘beaks’. The idea is (as of course you would have guessed) that the warm spring caterpillar moves to quickly, being gone before the chick is able to get it; the cold one being slow (and hanging too low), representing that the caterpillars are still absent or too small to be descent food; and the normal one, in general being perfectly timed. I say “in general” because, as with most things, sometimes there might be some human error involved… By the way, just to be clear, they were candy caterpillars.     

I can also write a whole story about the stress involved giving my presentation. Not that I was nervous, but mostly because the organizers thought it was a good idea to ask everyone for a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation (and to certainly not bring your own memory stick and computer) and then, without telling anyone in advance, have it run on an Apple. Forget about a story, I can write a book about why this was not a good idea.
                Thanks to the very nice people of the Vogeltrekstation, who did bring a (non-Apple) computer, everything turned out just perfect and I could run my presentation (with awesome video’s and sounds) without a problem. It’s the best way of letting people join in a bit on the great job I have and hopefully teach them a bit about the fascinating lives and habits of great tits.

However, I am just a Rookie in the bird world. There are other people there that know so much more, idols for many bird people (me and Peter). You know their names, you have seen them on television, heard them on radio and seen them in books and newspapers and then… you meet them. You belong to ‘the bird world’ now and suddenly you are there shaking their hand. Such a person is Nico de Haan (http://www.vogelkijkcentrum.nl/ndh.php3 ). Some sort of a legend, a mystical creature with all its mysterious ways. The grey beard, the secretive smile, the way he appears to be able to divide himself in multiple persons and be everywhere at once (seven times! Ask http://www.peterimwald.blogspot.nl/) and of course his wise and encouraging words when we were trying very hard to hold our stand together “Het waait wel, maar het waait over”; “The wind blows, but it will blow over”.

Every time when you think you are somewhere teaching others, never forget, you still got so much to learn.

Best wishes!

The conference

If you think conferences are boring you should become a biologist. Not because you would not have to go to conferences and can just chase birds and butterflies all day, because we have conferences too. However, the major difference between a biology conference and other conferences is that our conferences are fun! I shall give you several reasons for this:

First reason: no suits. Yes, it is true, biologists really walk in shorts and sandals as often as they can, so also at conferences. And then I am not even mentioning the shirts. Some people could make a rainbow jealous with the colours of their shirt, while others (and this is typical biologist behaviour) will try and promote their study-species by wearing shirts with a print of them, for example: a barnacle goose (totally random example). All of this, of course, only applies to the men, we girls always looked very normal and descent.  

Second reason: we have an easy way of remembering people. With a conference comes the problem of having to remember all those names. But with all these different animals around to study (it was a conference about animal social networks) we can easily talk about people by referring to their study species: the flamingo guy, the manikin man, the girl with the sealions and the fish people. Somehow we always called (or maybe it was just me) the people studying great tits, the Oxford people. Important to keep in mind is that this only works when you are talking about people and not to them. Good thing we also had name tags.

Third reason: you can make great deals. Everybody is always doing fieldwork on very exotic places, except for the people working with great tits of course. So if you have something to trade... like base stations... (totally random example again), you could try and  work yourself in doing some fieldwork on the Galapagos Islands. Also it is important to get allies. If people in other places are doing almost the same study as you, then it is handy to have some accomplices around who can keep an eye open and for instance if necessary (purely hypothetical) kidnap their study species in return for acknowledgements in a paper.

Fourth reason: field trips. With all that talking and watching and listening and eating and drinking coffee, we need a break some times. So what do biologists do? We go to the Zoo! Our conference building was located next to a beautiful piece of forest.  When we walked about half an hour through forest and meadow we would end up at a free 24-hour zoo with German wild life, like wolves and bears and wolverines etc (maybe this is a good moment to mention the conference was in Germany). The zoo was very beautiful and somehow I ended up visiting it 3 times in 2 days.   

Last reason: biologists are just extremely nice, interesting and funny people! (with a bad taste of music they tend to work into their presentations)

And if you are still not convinced (probably all you non-biologists out there), here is just a fun picture:

Cheers!