This is part 1 of a 3 part series. See also:
It was all very well living through the cosy Holocene period when the global climate was by-and-large just peachy and relatively unmenacing, but these days, in the thick of an unregulated energy pulse event, only one condition is certain about our climate – endless change. Well not ‘endless’ as such, but when a number has more than four zeros in it, you might as well say ‘endless’. And when the climate changes, every ecosystem on the planet changes with it.
We, that is, those of us who engage with the natural world, are witness to the most rapid and globalised change in natural living systems since the…well, nobody really knows since what, but since a very long time indeed. Probably since millions of years. All natural baselines are blurring and reorganising in response to a heating climate, shifting rainfall patterns, disrupted flowering events, early spring warming, longer and more intense fire seasons, longer and deeper droughts, extreme weather and other climate-related reactivity.
Some baselines are changing imperceptibly, others dramatically. Day by day, the 10,000 year “normal” climate envelope of every square centimetre of the Earth is shifting somewhere else, shifting to the poles and shifting uphill. Every food web is being transformed. Nature is doing what it does best, trying to adapt, to survive, to be resilient, to hold on and to exploit opportunities.
So, keeping records of your field observations for birds now has a completely new application. Detailed observations of birds and bird-related stuff, made across many years at a single location, can document the shifting dynamics of a local ecosystem from its Holocene baseline. Indeed, this is the only way we found out, for instance, that species such as Common Koel, Black-faced Monarch, Cicadabird, Channel-billed Cuckoo and Sacred Kingfisher are already being impacted on by climate change through changing their departure and arrival times on their northern winter migration across NSW.
Not only does keeping longitudinal field notes contribute to citizen science but they make meaning out of the apparent chaos of birds seemingly just doing stuff at random. Discerning trends in seasonal movements and behaviour of your local birds only comes through connecting the dots of noticing when birds appear, disappear, call, go quiet, court, nest, change plumage, shift diet etc. Many such dots are required to create a meaningful and authentic image.
Some of these insights appear to float off the page in the first couple of years, but many – the really eye-watering epiphanies, usually take longer to emerge, but when they do, they fundamentally change the way you relate to a landscape.
There are two types of field observation records I’d like to mention here as I think they offer you the most productive means of fast-tracking your bird language learning and nature connection skills more generally:
2 thoughts on “Record keeping 1: On Keeping Field Notes”
Comments are closed.