Scaring Birds To Conserve Them

In late November 2015 at the end of my second year of my Bachelor’s degree at Deakin I joined my course director Dr. Mike Weston on a bird behaviour project in Sri Lanka. The project involved measuring the Flight Initiation Distances (FID) of birds to human walking approaches in Sri Lanka. This basically meant walking up to a bird and measuring the distance at which it made an escape response which is the distance at which it flew, started walking, running or swam away if it was in water. The objective of the project was to facilitate urban development, sustainable eco-tourism and good park management around wetlands and critical habitats to minimise the negative impact on birds, particularly on the breeding patterns of endemic, migratory and endangered species. We avoided disturbing birds which were breeding.

Mike and I initially collected FIDs at a few wetlands around Colombo. It was Mike’s first visit to Sri Lanka so he enjoyed the spicy food, but was terrified of the driving tactics employed by drivers. While Mike and I were based in Wasgamuwa in Sri Lanka during my university internship with Elephants, we collected FIDs around the region sometime with early start in the mornings. We were joined by Mike’s then PhD student Kasun Ekanayake where we spent a weekend in central Sri Lanka collecting FIDs on a majority of the rainforests species in the region. Mike and Kasun continued their journey to collect FIDs in the south of the country while I returned to my team in Wasgamuwa to complete my internship but continued to collect FIDs where I could.

In 2016 Mike and I with the aid of Tiran and our driver Dinusha undertook a 2 week trip to the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka. I organised all the field logistics for the trip from Australia and had now completed by Bachelor’s degree. I went with Tiran and Dinusha to pick up Mike from Wasgamuwa. On our way to the north we stopped over at the University of Peradeniya to meet our in-country academic collaborator Prof. Kithsiri Ranawana who helped us obtain our research permit from the Department of Conservation. It turned out Prof. Ranawana previously taught Tiran while he was at university. We had the luxury of spending the night at Kasun’s parents home before making our way north. This was my first time visiting the north of the country and I was the first one from my family to do so after the civil war. It was a joy to converse in Tamil with everyone. Our first stop was in Mannar which had wild donkeys roaming around the town. Mike was the only person who ended up getting chased by a donkey and amusingly commented that the donkeys didn’t seem to like white men. We drove on to Vavuniya and then Kilinochchi. To our dismay despite booking rooms the motels at both towns had forgotten about our hotel booking, so after some negotiation we finally got the rooms we had booked.

Once we had completed our fieldwork there we journeyed to Jaffna which was my family’s hometown. My father had given me directions to certain places, but all those directions were of no us since building locations had shifted after the war. While we were in Jaffna we were hit by a cyclone and this resulted in us being confined indoors for the whole day and made worse when we had to shift rooms due to the hotel roof leaking in certain parts. Jaffna which is supposed to be one of the hottest city in the country was freezing for two days similar to a winter’s day in Melbourne due to the after effects of the cyclone. It was amazing to visit some of the islands off Jaffna and drive along the causeways. We also made a visit to the iconic Nallur Hindu temple which had survived the war. The brutal evidence of the war was still visible with broken buildings and bullet holes on walls where people were lined up and executed at the Jaffna Fort during the war. Our last stop was at Mullaitivu, which was the region which saw the worst effects of the war. It was a very strange feeling of walking around the forests of Mullaitivu working with birds where only in 2009 this was still a war zone. At all our stops the Tamil dishes we ate were divine. I was very fortunate to see large flocks of Flamingos at both Mannar and Jaffna for the first time in the wild.

Mike and Kasun continued to collect FIDs in 2017 and 2018 while I read for Masters degree in Brisbane. At the end of 2018 Mike said he had sufficient data to analyse and publish. In 2019 after completing my tenure in Mauritius I joined Deakin University as a Research Assistant to work under Mike and clean up the data and submit it for analysis for publication. After 9 months of cleaning up data and streamlining it according to the analysis software requirements I finally was able to submit to Dr. Matt Symonds who conducted the analysis. We had ended up collecting the 1400 FIDs from 157 bird species in Sri Lanka.

As hypothesised, the main results of our study were as follows

1. Bird species in war zones had longer FIDs than species which were outside war zones.

2. Larger bird species had longer FIDs than small species.

Due to the effects of deforestation, poaching of bird eggs, mines exploding, bullets flying and hunting of larger species for food, birds would have been terrified of humans in war zones, thus initiating faster escape response.

After being rejected by 10 scientific journals, in September 2021 the first paper from this study was published in the American Naturalist. It was my first scientific paper to be published and also as lead author. To date I have been contacted by 4 journalists (1 Australian and 3 Sri Lankan) about this paper requesting interviews so that they could publish news articles on the findings which has been good publicity. The second of the papers is currently under review and I am hopeful it will be accepted soon for publication. I hope the findings of our study will be used in Sri Lanka when it comes to bird conservation and management.