Discovering Zoology Through My Passion for Birdwatching II: Is There a Final Word in Research?

Abdul Jamil Urfi

Being always interested in birds (read part 1 of my story in science), I wanted to do a PhD in ecology, ornithology etc and pursue a career in academics. But in the 1980’s, there seemed to be few avenues available for this in India. Since my MSc Zoology specialization was in fisheries, a fellowship offer to study fish muscle histophysiology at the University of Delhi’s Zoology department landed in my lap and I happily accepted.

Prof. Abdul Jamil Urfi

Fish move in a dense medium, bedeviled by drag forces, and so their body muscles (what we eat, actually) or the myotomal musculature is uniquely adapted (click here for details). For instance, their arrangement of slow and fast contracting muscle fibers is very different from those of terrestrial vertebrates. My PhD project was to study how these fibers differentiate and develop from the time when the fish is an embryo to the point when it becomes an adult. To cut a long story short, while the theme was definitely interesting work, the histochemical and biochemical work wasn’t that appealing to me.

A view of the Painted Stork colonies at the Delhi zoo with the ramparts of the Old fort in the background. (Photo A J Urfi)

I was inside the lab most of the time working on tissue sections using a cryostat, staining them for enzymes or doing enzyme assays and gel electrophoresis. As time passed, I became cocksure that I wanted to be a field worker and not a laboratory scientist.

Meanwhile, as the outdoors and the world of birds continued to beckon me, I decided to revive my interest in birds, which had taken a backseat. I started revisiting my favorite birdwatching haunts, one of which was the Delhi zoo in which an absolutely free ranging population of Painted Stork has been regularly nesting for a very long time.

Running away from the lab every other day, I was in the zoo watching the storks as they went about doing their daily chores. Not being a trained ecologist or behavioral scientist, I tried my best to make sense of the things they were doing. Word got around that someone was hanging around the Painted Stork nesting colonies quite often. One day, an officer there during the course of a conversation asked whether I had discovered any new knowledge about the Painted Stork from my studies. I said nothing, so far. Then, rather haughtily he said, “…and you will discover nothing new. All the work on it has already been done.”

A Painted Stork foraging in the marshes (Photo Arbin Thakur)

In a way, he was right because a person by the name of Dr. J.H. Desai, an ex-director of the zoo, had done his PhD on the Painted Stork of the Delhi zoo. That had been in the 1960’s, about two decades earlier when species specific studies on wildlife, usually involving documenting facts about a particular species were becoming fashionable. Say, if it was a bird, then its clutch size, weight of the nest, duration of incubation period, what items were in its diet etc.

Desai’s research was an impressive tome of work no doubt but when I began studying it in detail, I discovered that there were some shortcomings which was typical of those times. For instance, no aspect of population biology had been assessed. Among some methodological issues, important parameters such as ‘nest success’ had been estimated in an old fashioned way as percentages. (A chap called Mayfield had come along later and proposed an entirely new way to estimate nest success. However, the Mayfield method took its own time to become commonly used by ornithologists. Now, in the age of computers, this parameter is modeled, using specialized software (Program Mark) as daily nest survival rate (DSR) along with a host of parameters (covariates) which can influence nest survival).

But at a time when I was trying to look at the Painted Stork afresh with unblinkered eyes, essentially what my zoo officer friend was telling me was the following: “Since Dr Desai has said the final word on this subject, don’t waste your time. Go home and sit quietly.”

Is there such a thing as a final word on any subject and how exactly does knowledge advance? An insight into this came from a fairly erudite person – also an impressive speaker, Prof Moonis Raza – who was then the Vice-Chancellor of the Delhi University. During a speech about advancement in knowledge at a function organized in our department, Prof. Raza alluded to a lighted candle placed in a dark room by way of illustration.

I still have some years left before I retire. But the clock has started ticking and I can hear it loud and clear.

He said, its illuminated zone represents, in terms of drawing an analogy to knowledge, the answers to certain questions. But surrounding the flame is a thin translucent zone, which is a bit diffuse and you can only partly see things through it. This, according to the Professor, was the zone signifying ‘you know what you don’t know’. And all around the candle, beyond a point, is an area of darkness, where the light emanating from the small candle does not reach; where nothing is known!

Now, if you increase the size of the candle then you increase the core illuminated region. You now have answers to many more questions, but the size of the translucent zone has also increased because more questions have arisen based on earlier research. So now you also know more about what you don’t know.

All this sounded very impressive back then when we were young students. But it said a thing or two about the final word which my friend in the zoo had flagged. No one knew for sure if this was Prof Raza’s original formulation or he had heard or read it from somewhere. I have since tried to Google for quotations on candle light to find out if anybody had said something similar but no luck so far. For curiosities sake, I have also placed a lighted candle in a room to see what the translucent zone actually looks like.

After my PhD, I decided to switch over to birds completely. Though I was largely self taught, I spent a couple of years with Dr J D Goss-Custard at ITE Furzebrook, as a European Commission Fellow. My project was studying the foraging ecology of the Oystercatcher—a small wading bird which eats mussels among other things, over wintering on the Exe estuary in South England. John G-C had been a pioneer in foraging ecology, having published one of the earliest studies testing Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT) diet models on a wader (Redshank) by using observational methods in the field way back in the 1970’s.

My years with G-C, discussions with colleagues and learning how to collect data on bird behavior and analyze it using statistical software (which was a new emerging tool in those days) I learnt a lot which gave me confidence about how to study bird behavior in the field and how to frame questions in behavioral ecology. I returned home with some good papers which undoubtedly helped me professionally.

One of things which appealed to me about the Oystercatcher study at the Exe was that my English colleagues had developed a system for field studies on a long term basis and were studying its different dimensions. A lot of things were known but each successive study posed new questions which the field researcher’s team addressed. After years of field work and collection of empirical data they had come to a stage where they were making individual based simulation models, based on Game theory, by which they could make predictions about many things.

Could I do something similar here in India? At least develop a system for field studies on which I could explore the basic aspects of population ecology of a bird on a long term basis.

Well, the primary thing was to have a job. In this respect, I was lucky. Here at the Delhi University where I have been for the past 20 years as a faculty, my salary and security are taken care of. I could say I feel good, except, true to human nature, there is also a tendency to feel dissatisfied at times. After-all, surviving in the academe in India is often an ordeal.

The position itself came after a long period of struggle but finally, when I did join as a lecturer in 2001 my choice was clear—I wanted to develop the Delhi Zoo Painted Stork population as a system for conducting ecological studies on a long term basis.

For the service of science! Well let’s not be totally absurd. Also for building a career. With a population of wild birds, amenable to study at close quarters, it would have been pointless to run off to faraway places or study exotic species.

All the years that I have been here at Delhi University, I have guided several PhD’s on birds of which four have been on different aspects of Painted Stork ecology. I have published in international peer reviewed journals (and nowadays, they don’t publish easily) so there must be something new in what I have done. Which also makes me wonder if the final word had been said!

There have been criticisms of my work. My most vociferous critics, some of them being my colleagues, say I am merely doing birdwatching, which is true to an extent. I still watch a bird but it is not exactly that sort of birdwatching which involves ticking on checklists, akin to stamp collecting, or chasing rarities. For my work, I go to the field with a carefully researched data recording protocol and once I have collected the data then research becomes a game of numbers and it is me and my computer doing data crunching. My field work is largely observational and non-invasive  (and I circumvent problems associated with catching and trapping live animals and permits for it).

My critics also say what they are doing is useful for humanity (for instance developing transgenics of food crops which they think is the answer to mankind’s hunger problems). But my work has its uses too. (See the Zoo story above in the box).

Interestingly, among my critics are those who work in areas of biological research where they are able to ask for big sums of money in grants for instrumentation, chemicals etc. My work is comparatively low cost and I fear, in their eyes I score low; I have less power to hire and fire, less over heads etc.

In my book on the Painted Stork, acknowledging Desai’s work I quoted a line which is attributed to Sir Isaac Newton: ‘If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants’.

That may sound like a big thing coming from a small guy like me who is just an ordinary worker among the millions of professional biologists in the world.

I still have some years left before I retire but the clock has started ticking and I can hear it loud and clear. In the long run, while some of what we did will become incorporated in the corpus of ornithological literature, much of it will also become obsolete. But someone (I hope) will likely to come along and take a look at this wonderful opportunity for research—a large population of an endangered species of bird nesting in urban premises which is possible to study from close quarters. Just as I did, new questions will be asked using new techniques of analysis. Desai’s work will be used as a base to ask fresh questions or revisit old questions, either because they are still unresolved or because they appear to be interesting.