Meet the Researcher: Why I Love Birds

 

When someone asks me why I chose to study birds, it is not hard for me to come up with an answer.  There are five pivotal bird encounters within my memory that I can clearly remember that foreshadowed my passion for studying birds. You will have to forgive me, as this will be a very long post, but I am working on a YouTube video which will be posted early next week to be a little more concise.

The first bird I clearly remember noticing was a Northern Cardinal, and I was nine years old.  Growing up in New Jersey, Northern Cardinals are quite common but the house we lived in at the time had a cool deck on the second story that birds liked to visit. I remember this Cardinal most clearly because it inspired my first piece of written poetry, which I believe I saved in an old diary somewhere.  It is part of the reason that I decided to include Northern Cardinals as a focal species for my Master's Thesis.

 

The second time was when I was about fifteen years old.  I had gone on a retreat with my youth group, and the campus had a lake.  I wasn't particularly interested in sitting in a stuffy old building, so I sat outside near the lake, journaling.  Out of absolutely no where (I swear I had no idea he was there), a Great Blue Heron took off about 10 feet away from me.  He was absolutely silent - all I could hear was the beat of his wings as he flew away.  Still one of the coolest moments of my life to date. 

The third was the summer before my sixteenth birthday.  A family of Blue Jays decided to nest in front of our house.  Every morning I awoke to the babies screaming for food, and the parents' protecting their youngsters.  Somewhere on an old camcorder tape, we have footage of them fledging and taking baths in the sprinklers.  The call of the Blue Jay is forever engrained into my brain because of this summer.

 

The fourth was the Association of Field Ornithologists Conference in Ogden, Utah in 2010.  This conference changed everything - and I knew so two days into it. It may be hard to believe, but I was actually originally pre-med in the first two years of my undergraduate career.

 This conference showed me what it was really like to be an ornithologist, and that research within this field was booming.  For some reason I had never considered that I could study birds as a job.  It was also the first time I went on serious early-morning birding expeditions.  On top of that, it was migratory season for a lot of birds in SLC, and it was the first time I had ever seen tens of thousands of birds, with my own eyes, in front of me.  I was so inspired by it all. I remember telling my professor, who was there with us for a poster presentation, "I'm screwed.  I'm not going to be able to study anything but birds." From that moment on I became a self-proclaimed bird-nerd, and I knew I was hooked. 

 

The fifth and final moment, which got me interested in tropical conservation in general was my Tropical Field Ecology course trip at the end of 2011.  Instead of walking for graduation, I joined a class of 20 classmates on a 10-day trip to Costa Rica, where we got to see TONS of birds (like the Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl seen above).  I also got to hold and warm up a hummingbird in my hand (see the first pic from this post :D)  Needless to say, it was pretty awesome.

 

To be truthful, those are only a few of the reasons I decided to pursue ornithology as a career.  There are plenty others, which I hope to write more about in future posts (there are some silly reasons, as well). Stay tuned for the companion video to this blog post, and have a great weekend!

To all my bird-nerds out there: do you have any memorable bird moments? Tell me about them!  Or, if you are studying something else... what sparked your passion?