‘Citizen scientists’ to the rescue
All data assists in research and analysis of indigenous bird species
ON NOVEMBER 1, 1990, Russian ornithologist and taxonomist Pavel Tomkovich shot a sanderling – a small wading bird weighing less than 100g that migrates huge distances annually between the northern and southern hemispheres.
It might have seemed an unusual act by a bird-lover who is now head of ornithology at the Moscow State University and curator of its oological collection, and its collection of non-passerine birds. (Oology is a branch of ornithology involving the study of birds’ eggs, nests and breeding behaviour, and passerines are songbirds or, more accurately, birds that can perch.)
But, explains Professor Les Underhill of UCT’S Animal Demography Unit, it was not a decision that Tomkovich had taken lightly.
The scientist had been on an expedition to the Taymyr Peninsula, deep in the Siberian Arctic region, when he had spotted the bird shortly before the end of his trip. The reason it stood out from the probably tens of thousands of other birds with it was because of a small metal ring around its right foot.
Killing the bird was Tomkovich’s only way of recovering the ring and so getting access to invaluable data about its movements, Underhill told his UCT Summer School audience during a recent lecture.
“He shot it reluctantly, but he was far from his base camp and he knew that he’d never get back to this particular spot again. And while the issue of shooting specimens for collections is a separate debate, a huge amount of biodiversity knowledge that we have comes out of collections.”
It was Underhill himself who had ringed the tiny migrant at Kommetjie beach nearly three years earlier, on March 11, 1988, and he was given the news in a letter from Tomkovich after the Russian had traced him through the information on the ring.
They calculated that the bird had flown at least 13 420km between the Cape beach and its Arctic breeding ground, and had been doing the round-trip twice a year since fledging.
“And to this day, it remains the only shore bird ringed in South Africa and actually recovered on its breeding grounds on the Taymyr Peninsula – an amazing place, one of the world’s greatest ‘wader factories’,” Underhill noted.
In 1990, Underhill was a statistics specialist in the Department of Mathematics at UCT, and bird-ringing was a hobby, albeit a serious one with a scientific underpinning. As far as the ringing was concerned, he was a “citizen scientist”.
But within a year, he had successfully married these two interests into the new scientific discipline that is now known as statistical ecology, and had become the founding director of the Avian Demography Unit – now the Animal Demography Unit (ADU), located within the Zoology Department at UCT – where this science is researched and taught at postgraduate level.
The ADU is celebrating its 20th anniversary year with a series of events, one of which was a five-part lecture series on Citizen Science.
Underhill explained how data provided by ordinary citizens, many of whom had no formal scientific background, was a crucial element in the monitoring of biodiversity change.
The ADU is busy with, or has already completed, a number of projects in which hundreds of citizen scientists collect data in the field according to carefully designed protocols, and which is then collated, verified, interpreted and presented in proper scientific for- mats by the researchers.
Projects include a number of “atlases” which detail with huge accuracy where species occur in SA.
Other research includes projects like the aptly named Cwac (Co-ordinated Waterbird Count) which has run continuously since 1992; Car (Co-ordinated Avifaunal Roadcounts, although as someone pointed out, Counting Along Roads is simpler) which monitors large terrestrial birds; and the selfexplanatory Birp (Birds in Reserves Project).
“Ultimately, the biggest shortfall in conservation in South Africa and globally is the lack of good data. We’re still desperately short of good, hard data.”
There had been rapid changes in certain bird populations, such as the expansion into the Western Cape of the amethyst sunbird, hadeda ibis and fork-tailed drongo which had been, and were being, tracked and quantified through citizen science involvement in the bird atlas projects, Underhill pointed out.
Elsewhere, the “pretty alarming” decline of the black stork from most of SA had only been picked up because of this involvement, as had been changes in the habitat of SA’S national bird, the blue crane – now effectively extinct in the northern parts of the country.
“A well-designed citizen science project can multiply our data collection ability a gazillion-fold, so being a citizen scientist is about making a difference. It’s about being an activist in our society.”