Question: What is the madest/most unusual thing you have ever done to find out about birds?

Renata Medeiros answered on 19 Jun 2013:

Well, I’ve done a few things that looking back now seem pretty mad! One of them was when I was determined to catch a storm petrel at sea. We usually catch them from a cliff by playing on a megaphone the calls that they make at a colony (that makes them think the cliff could be a colony and they go checking it out to see if there are any good nesting places for them). At the cliff we were mainly catching females so I though if I caught some birds far at sea maybe I would get the males. So my colleagues and I set off on a catamaran boat during the night to catch the birds. We put up some bird nets around the boat and even tried to build a floating net (though we would probably have to swim to go and get the birds if we caught any)! We managed to catch 2 birds in total, not due to our great effort with the nets but because they just landed on the boat for a little rest! It turned out that one was a male and the other a female so not much help there! We all spend the whole night awake and got terribly sick just to learn that it wouldn’t work!