Part 3. Studying Birds.

Image 1. Slim Sreedharan’s The Problems of Ornithological research…
During the second half of the 1990s, Slim Sreedharan, an eminent Malaysia-based birder and once Hon. Curator of Birds at the Sarawak Museum, visited Singapore https://besgroup.org/2023/08/30/70034/. In a talk to local birdwatchers, he commented that local as well as regional birdwatchers had a tendency “to learn more and more about less and less”. He was of course referring to the obsessive indulgence in ticking and listing, activities that involve bird identification in the field and the ticking of checklists to record the species seen. But his comments were never taken seriously as birdwatchers were obliviously happy to continue doing what they had always done.

Image.2. The Birds of Singapore by Clive Briffett & Sutari b. Supari.
We have an abundance of field guides but there are still no good reference books on the local avian fauna https://besgroup.org/2025/01/05/from-looking-at-birds-to-studying-birds-the-story-of-the-bird-ecology-study-group-part-2-photographing-birds/. There is obviously an urgent need to move beyond “twitching” and “listing” https://besgroup.org/2005/07/01/excuse-me-are-you-an-ornithologist/. There were earlier calls for birdwatchers to look into bird behaviour. But then the leaders were never competent enough to deal with bird behaviour.

Image 3. The City and the Forest: Plant Life in Urban Singapore.
This was where a botanist came into the picture. Being a botanist, my interest has always been plants. However, my involvement with the then Malayan Nature Society (Singapore Branch) as Hon. Secretary (1978-1990) and Founding President of the Nature Society (Singapore) (1990-1995), exposed me to the activities of the Bird Group. Such activities have always been recreational – seeking out birds, identifying them and ticking checklists. The aim was to see who can have the most ticks on his or her checklist.

Fig. 4. Forging A Closer Relationship With Pink-necked Green Pigeons.
My interest in bird behaviour started in the late 1900s when a pair of Yellow-vented Bulbuls (Pycnonotus goiavier) nested in my urban garden. Next was a pair of Pink-necked Green Pigeons (Treron vernans) https://besgroup.org/2005/10/14/pink-necked-green-pigeons-1-the-search-for-information/ Then a pair of House Crows (Corvus splendens) nested high up on my palm tree. The breeding behaviour of the bulbuls was straight forward. That of the Green-Pigeons puzzled me as the male was in the nest every time I peeped in. Where was the female all day long? No information was forthcoming locally. From a foreign bird book, I learnt later that the male broods the eggs during the day while the female takes over the night shift.

Image 5. Look, what came out of the crow’s nest.
The nesting of the House Crows in the crown of my palm tree introduced me to brood parasites, birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other species. Local birdwatchers were well informed of this behaviour but were not interested in pointing their binoculars at crows. Why? Crows were then plentiful and they were considered trash birds. Became of their attitude I became the first local to document the nesting behaviour of crows. Birdwatchers generally fail to understand that common species sometimes offer the most intriguing insights into nature’s complexity.

Image 6. Adult Asian Koel, courtesy of Johnny Wee.
When a chick appeared in the crow’s nest, it did not look like a crow. It was an Asian Koel (Eudynamys scolopacea). I was to learn that these koels are brood parasites. They lay their eggs in the nests of other species of birds that will look after their chicks https://besgroup.org/2006/01/24/house-crows-nests/. This information was then widely known. The irony was that a local plant watcher became the first Singaporean and a non-birdwatcher at that, to document such an interesting breeding behaviour.

Image 7. Anting in Singapore Birds, Nature in Singapore 2008: 1:23-25.
When Kelvin K.P. Lim, a young nature enthusiast then, came across a Javan Myna (Acridotheres javanicus) repeatedly picking up live ants and placing them under its wings https://besgroup.org/2005/10/16/anting-ants-in-my-pants/ and https://besgroup.org/2017/11/18/down-memory-lane-anting-2/. Birdwatchers were totally ignorant of what was going on. It was about a decade or more later that we found out that the bird was anting, using ants to rid their feathers of ectoparasites. Such a behaviour was well documented in the western world. With this episode I came to the conclusion that the Bird Group would always remain a recreational group. Obviously a new activity group needs to be formed to study bird behaviour.

Fig. 8. Logo of the Bird Ecology Study Group.
The formation of the Bird Ecology Group (BESG) was driven by a desire to expand the scope of our collective understanding of birds. This new activity group would focus specifically on bird ecology that includes feeding, breeding and other aspects of bird life. The BESG was not to compete with the Bird Group (BG) but to complement it. This in turn would enhance the Nature Society’s work by introducing a research-focused group that includes scientific perspective on birdlife.