Birds, Not of a Feather
ZAKHIYA
This picture is a tribute to my Master’s thesis work and the rehabilitating experience of the whole year. I was disillusioned with science big time through my undergraduate years and was already pondering about alternatives. I decided to finish the diverse list of my projects I tried whilst at IISER with the last prominent field on it that was yet to be explored, behaviour-ecology-evolution.
I knew I had an ease, inkling and comfort with the broad field, it made sense to me and its ideas fascinated me consistently even in my most disinterested and troubled phases, for no capitalisable reason. It allowed me to be abstract and be subjective at the same time, I enjoyed that apparent contradiction, and I found some harmony in existing in that complexity. Maybe it was the way it was introduced and taught to me, or maybe it is the marginality of the field; I was attracted to the humility that seemed essential to the process of knowledge building in these fields.
I haven't see another field accept and state more loudly the doubt, the uncertainty in its theories and concepts, and more importantly a lack of clarity about what these uncertainties are while still striving hard to make sense of the complex truths it deals with."
"
Technically, now I know that most scientific disciplines are in essence like this, but for some reasons, maybe in that the things or facts they deal with are so far away, or maybe just that these were areas which I was attuned to perceive best in, I felt that the people I met with and the material I read on the subject, spoke to me the best like I had grown up understanding science to be. So after my attempts at doing more ‘useful’ science I ended up back here.
I had a moment while writing my thesis or towards the end of my field work days in Anshi, Karwar when I put two and two together and realised that I was some kind of ornithologist that year. I recalled how I did a project on water birds in school and told the examiner that I will become an Ornithologist like Salim Ali when I grow up. But that wasn’t my guiding motive whilst choosing this particular project for my Master’s Thesis. I chose this because I was interested in sociality, cooperation and communication and studying these behaviours in birds was more practical than fishes or mammals considering the time I had at hand. I recalled how my school friends fondly reiterated the stories of me being distracted with birds in the assembly or getting lost behind some bugs or bees or trees on trips. I was then reminded that an older me, even if briefly, did dream of doing what I was doing! I think for her, I had to study birds sometime, for a year at least, and I drew this picture around that time.
While drawing the picture, I also remembered my mother’s curiosity when she took breaks from her chores to step out to look at a bird. I tried to represent the drongo, minevets, fulvettas, paradise flycatcher and babblers in the drawing, because these were the birds I was studying in Karwar, the very same birds that my mother stepped out to look at back home, a bit more south of the Western Ghats, and whose Malayalam names she told me of. Even though she didn’t express much of it, I remember understanding how excited she was, to use the binoculars that I took back home to look at a whistling duck that was nesting on a coconut tree quite far away. I think she would have been a good naturalist if only she knew that she could be one, and how to be one.
For my research, I was trying to understand how the niches of a species alter in the presence of other co-participants. I would walk various trails systematically in the morning and in the evening, trying to follow, observe and record the presence of birds and different measures of their behaviour. Initially considering the short time available for a master’s thesis, we planned to do a comparative study of birds in two kinds of forest, looking at the diversity in the flocks observed, which at a later stage had to be abandoned due to forest fires and some other issues.
The birds in the drawing are made with two lines, like folding threads without lifting or retracing except for one leg. I wanted to represent the connectivity, communication and unison in mixed-species bird flocks - a flock formed when individuals from multiple species of birds come together to forage, move and defend through the day as a single union (unit). I think it was a beautiful experience to go back outside to open spaces with just conditional binoculars, after being tired of obligatory microscopes, computers, chemicals and labs. I think for me, it is important to be out and about, active, and in vastness.
Eventually the behavioural data that I was collecting just because I could, out of curiosity and fun ended up being the data that I actually analysed for the final thesis. Niches–the multi dimensional space-time volume that an organism occupies–a concept I was hooked to, ended up being the question that I finally worked on. Since the most visible approach to understanding interspecies interactions in evolutionary biology and ecology emphasise competition, I found myself initially trying to understand niches through concepts such as competitive exclusion and niche partitioning. But focussing on cooperation in interspecies interactions helped me revisit the niche concept, and I engaged with ideas such as ‘niche construction’, and more broadly niche expansion. This expanded what the concept of niche meant for me, which was a very rewarding experience of discovering some bit of knowledge.
I worked with Dr Priti Bangal and Prof Kartik Shanker from the Centre for Ecological Sciences at IISc. I was also mentored by Dr Hari Sridhar, who had begun the work on mixed species bird flocks in the field site in Karwar and Prof Sutirth Dey, who taught me niche theory and other basics in ecology and evolution along with Prof Deepak Barua, Prof Anand Krishnan and Prof Nishad Matange at IISER Pune.
In other words, to conclude poetically, these flock participants expanded my niche.
About Zakhiya
Zakhiya P C is a PhD scholar at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. For her PhD she looks at behavioural data of bonnet macaques trying to understand their social structure and individual personalities. She graduated in 2020 from IISER Pune with an integrated bachelors and masters degree in the natural sciences. Zakhiya is a laidback writer, and a situational artist. She is curious about the workings of people and the world around her, and hopes that her expressions are an honest documentation of these thought explorations. She like to express through words, lines, colours and photographs whenever expression becomes inevitable.
Related Posts
Chasing Plant Fragrances
ANUPAMA
"People often ask me, “Why go through all the trouble of collecting floral scents directly from the field? Can’t you just pluck the flowers, boil them, and extract the essence?” Well, sure, I could do that—but it would only give me a chemical snapshot of the flowers, but not the story behind the fragrance."
Share this page: