Question: why do you study birds instead of other animals?

Renata Medeiros answered on 18 Jun 2013:

Birds are very interesting animals to study because they can (usually) fly and make good use of it! Although not all bird species travel great distances, many of them do and this means that, more than any other animal, they have no boundaries – countries can not claim to own them. So in a way, birds connect people because if we really want to understand their habits, their needs and their threats, we need to work together with scientists from all over the world. It won’t really help to protect a bird species breeding in the UK if those birds are then being killed while they are spending the winter somewhere else!
Birds are very visible and they are usually what we call good indicators of habitat quality, meaning that if they are doing well we know that their habitat is healthy but if they are struggling to find food or to produce babies, it is a good clue that something is wrong with their habitat. Because birds travel long distances, studying them also gives us great clues to how healthy their habitats are in the different places they visit.
The seabirds I’m studying are giving us many information about marine life in general and how they might deal with changes in our climate, which is getting warmer and warmer (I know this sounds good news but it is actually worrying for many species, including ourselves).
These are all very good reasons to study birds but there are very good reasons to study any other animal really. So I didn’t think of any of these reasons when I decided to study birds. I knew I wanted to study animal behaviour but I wasn’t even particularly interested in birds, until, at university, I met a scientist who was going to a remote island to study some seabirds that could even be a new species that no one has ever discovered (we weren’t sure because they looked very much like another species that we knew well). I decided to go with him as his assistant and ever since I never wanted to do anything else. So I think the more you know something the more you fall in love with it and that was just what happened to me!