Me and my binoculars

This month I took up bird watching in the pursuit of scientific research. This mandatory bird watching was a requirement of a research report for my other summer paper Biology, investigating whether or not native birds are more commonly found in native gardens. Yes at first glance of the assignment brief I groaned and moaned for a good five minutes but luckily my resistance wavered at the joy of completing some quantitative work.

So after scouring the net I soon found some great tips and instructions on successful bird watching on a New Zealand website: Land Care Research. Armed with a comfy bean bag, a set of binoculars, a bird guide and some bird sheets I begrudgingly set off at 5am each morning to complete my bird watching rounds at four different gardens.

Well, I am not going to lie it was boring for the first few mornings. And sometimes the motivation to get out of bed early just wasn’t there. As beautiful as the birds were the time did seem to drag on. That was until I saw my first Silver eye up and personal. What a gorgeous bird! Their markings look like over dramatic eye make up Lady Gaga would wear!! From that moment I was hooked and I actually began to enjoy my mornings spent bird watching.

                                                               Silvereye Bird

But I digress from the most important result of my bird watching: the data. By keeping to a strict, time consuming bird watching schedule I ended up with a huge amount of data. The larger sample size made it fairly easy to show a connection between native fauna and native birds. My results section was a breeze to write and I actually had to cull over half of my discussion because I had so much to write about. And that was all down to simply mucking in and turning what was a supposed terrible situation *into a great chance to learn about the environment around us.

As students of science it is important to put discomfort and boredom aside in the name of research. I am really glad I did and the benefits extended beyond my assignment. I learnt so much about how birds interact with each other and noticed their adaptive survival behaviors and feeding routines. I must admit I am a bit hooked on bird watching now. Since finishing the report I am still dragging my binoculars around religiously hoping for a brief glimpse of a Karearea (New Zealand Falcon) and I even slipped my bird guide into the beach bag for a bit of light reading. Oh well there are worse hobbies out there I guess……..

(*Now I only call enforced bird watching a terrible situation due to the Biology stream sight being inundated with whiny posts about the injustice of us students spending precious summers hours watching birds!!)