A page from the field diary

03 Mar A page from the field diary

Read on to see what our intern, Shraddha, has to say about her first day of fieldwork!

It is the first day of our field visits. I am super excited and a little nervous to be on the field and work with the group. Our task – to monitor bird activity on different trees in the city. I hope I can still identify birds as I could back in Bidar.

We walked to a small grove of semal trees in the park and monitored three of these trees which were next to each other. They haven’t started flowering yet but should be blooming fully in another 10 days or so. It was a day of many new finds – I saw a rufous treepie and three grey hornbills together for the first time! The treepie is a really pretty bird, with its white, black, and rufous colored body, and is easy to identify by its call as well.

After learning how to monitor bird activity on the tree using the protocol Vallari has developed, we measured the height and girth of the tree using different instruments. I knew how to measure the girth because of the workshop I had attended just two days back, where we learned how to measure the girth of trees at shoulder height.

We then took the height of the trees with a pretty cool instrument – a rangefinder. It had several different modes to measure tree heights, and it took me a couple of tries to get it right. By this time, I was super anxious, wondering what the others might be thinking of me since I didn’t get it right in the first go. My anxiety also built up because I have come from a different field altogether and actually never done something like this before.

I put this thought behind me and relaxed a little as we walked around the park and looked at different trees that were around us which could potentially be monitored for the study. We also made a note of which trees were about to flower and which ones had already flowered, since we were going to be looking at flowering and fruiting trees.

I could identify several trees on my own as we walked around, like the banyan, peepul, and amaltas.

I could identify several trees on my own as we walked around, like the banyan, peepul, and amaltas. I see these trees frequently in and around my neighborhood. There were several new trees also for me, like chamrod, the silk-floss tree, and katsagon. I am sure there were many others, but these were the only names I remembered by the time I got back home!

Another amazing catch that day was the verditer flycatcher which we saw perched on a branch above us just by chance.  It was a really beautiful bird, with its forget-me-not blue plumage.

I could not have imagined what an interesting first day this would turn out to be. I am now looking forward to many more of these fun-filled days ahead!