| When I talk about my PhD, I usually end with the proviso: “But I’m not really a bird person.” Most people look confused at this point, as I’ve just described my research aim of understanding the decline of one Britain’s rarest breeding birds.
So if I’m not a bird person, what am I? In the years before my PhD I would have described myself as a freshwater entomologist, a bug person to my friends. My first roles in research involved looking at what my colleagues termed “bird food” and I insisted on calling “insect communities” (I was a bug person in a bird person’s world).
My PhD takes me into a world of space molecules and alien fart jokes
Alec Owens
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Knowing what a bird is eating can be key to understanding species decline. There are two main ways of doing this: by looking at what’s available to go into a bird’s beak, and looking at what’s coming out of the other end. My PhD does the latter, but by applying a non-bird technique to a bird-related problem.
The bird in question is the common scoter, which, despite the name, is in serious trouble in the UK. It’s had more than a 50% decline in population over the past 20 years, and less than 50 pairs are thought to remain today. To compound its misfortune, the species is a rather unexciting looking black duck, which breeds on remote lochs in Scotland. But that’s something I love about my PhD; I get to draw people’s attention away from pandas and eagles to consider the plight of unexciting black ducks.
So if I’m not a bird person and I’m no longer just a bug person, how am I going to solve the mystery of the common scoter’s decline? I’m going to use mud. More precisely, I’m going to use mud from lakes in Scotland. It’s a technique known as palaeolimnology and it involves taking cylindrical cores of sediment from the bottom of lakes. These cores allow us to reconstruct a lake’s ecological history by examining plant and animal remains laid down with the mud.
Each core is finely sliced and represents a window of deposition which can be dated using radio-isotopic techniques. Using this sediment archive, we can identify species that were present in the lake at any period and infer details about the environmental conditions. We are essentially using mud to look back in time.
This means we can answer questions that modern ecological studies struggle to address. We can look at what has changed for common scoter breeding in Scotland over the past hundred years and work out how these changes could have affected population numbers. Hopefully we will be able to come up with solutions.
My PhD busts the old stereotypes about 'selfish, smug' only children
Alice Violett
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That’s the thing I love most about my PhD: being able to apply a non-bird person’s approach to solve a bird problem. Wildlife conservation can be surprisingly factional, with different groups of specialists rarely consulting one another. Luckily for me, my four-person supervisory team has expertise in freshwater ecology, entomology, ornithology and palaeolimnology.
As well as having enough people to field our own five-a-side football team, we bring a broad range of views to the table. This cross-disciplinary approach has been invaluable over the past two-and-a-half years and my supervisors have been nothing short of excellent, supporting me with their expertise and continuing to provide alternate viewpoints to the scoter problem.
I’m not sure where life will take me after my PhD. Perhaps I will end up as a bird person after all; I am developing a fondness for those unexciting black ducks. And hopefully I’ll be visiting the very common common scoter in Scotland when I’m an old woman.
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