Malaysia: Birdwatchers for conservation

The 500 club
The Star 12 Jul 11;

BIRD watching is growing in popularity and is no longer the domain of the old. These days, it is common to see young people garbed in green and tan outfits and armed with binoculars, looking out for birds. Many are content with just jotting their sightings in their little notebooks but David Bakewell hopes to change that.

The bird watcher and editor of Malaysian bird watching magazine Suara Enggang, hopes that injecting some competitive “oomph” into the sport will encourage bird watchers to make their hobbies work for conservation.

A year ago, he started the Peninsular Malaysia 500 club, a list of bird watchers who can claim to have seen 500 species or more of the 656 species of birds found in the peninsula.

“I would like to encourage people to move along from just looking at birds to actually recording and submitting them into a centralised database so it becomes available as a conservation tool,” says Bakewell.

The idea is to spread awareness about what people can do with the online data bank Bird-I-Witness Malaysia, whilst simultaneously making the sport a little more exciting.

“Honestly, it’s just a bit of fun but if it has any value beyond that, it’s in making people aware of what’s rare, what’s becoming less common and networking with other people so you’re contributing to the overall knowledge of what’s going on around us.”

There are currently 10 bird watchers on the 500 list. At the top with 566 birds is 49-year-old Anthony Sebastian, followed by Bakewell himself at 553. Sebastian understands Bakewell’s obsession with birds. The Kuching-based environmental consultant used to travel all over Malaysia, listing birds.

“Although birds no longer dominate my existence, I owe everything I am today to them,” says the former president of Malaysian Nature Society. “I have my notes, dates and everything about my birding from my teens. It’s my private little treasure. I have become an ecologist because of this. The never-ending challenge of trying to understand them has made me what I am.”

Sebastian has been listing birds all his life, so getting on the 500 list was easy. “Every time one sees a new species, the experience is indescribable. When I first started, it was the thrill of the chase. Bird watching is actually hunting. It involves training yourself to track birds, hear them, know their calls, and eventually see them in optics ... everything a hunter has to have except pulling a trigger at the end. It’s a real rush!”

After 37 years of birding, however, Sebastian finds the hobby gives him something else today.

“It’s about what the birds can tell me, what they can show me and help me understand the surroundings of a particular area.”

Bakewell professes to be not one of those people who have to see everything but the two birds that he would really like to see in Malaysia are the black wood partridge, an extremely rare lowland rainforest bird, and the grey-breasted babbler, a rare lowland swamp forest species.

He is well aware that there are many other experienced birders who should be on the 500 list but just have not made it a point to inform him. To these birders, he invites them to join the list for they will, at the same time, be adding to our knowledge of Malaysian birds.

To find out who are on the 500 List, go to digdeep1962.blogspot.com. To report sightings in Bird-I-Witness Malaysia, go to worldbirds.org/malaysia.

The accidental conservationist
Natalie Heng The Star 12 Jul 11;

THE WORLD of bird watching, or “birding”, is an intriguing one. Obsessive, list-oriented and masculine, with more than a little focus on one-upmanship, it has its fair share of eccentrics.

The Dutch ethologist Nikolas Tinbergen (co-winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology) likened bird watching to “an expression of the male hunting instinct” whilst developmental psychopathologist Simon Baron-Cohen says it is associated with the “male tendency for systemising”.

David Bakewell has been birding for 40 years, and is inclined to agree them.

“It’s not about looking at pretty things. Being a birder is more like being a hunter – you need skills. It’s goal-oriented. There’s definitely a little of the obsessive-compulsive in serious bird watchers.”

Friends of the 48-year-old who lives with his wife and two daughters on the island of Penang say his bird watching habits border on the extreme. They might be right, for Bakewell is known to hang around mudflats in a tight, self-constructed box with nothing but a tiny hole to stick his camera lens through, for hours on end in the scorching sun.

“It’s not really that extreme,” he insists. “The birds come really close to me.”

Bakewell also makes regular trips out to sea with the ikan bilis (anchovy) fishmen of Tanjung Dawai, Kedah. He would sit patiently next to the wheelhouse for hours in the sun, with notebook, binoculars and camera in hand and eyes glued to the sky, looking out for that chance encounter.

It is not uncommon for the fishermen to stay out from seven in the morning till 10 in the evening, so by the time Bakewell gets back to Penang, he would have clocked up 17 hours in pursuit of his hobby.

This level of dedication might seem weird to some but it makes total sense to Bakewell, who runs his own environmental consultancy. In fact, he realised a long time ago that for him, bird watching is more than just a hobby. He says it is a way of opening doors, giving access not just to birds but to new learning experiences, cultural encounters and heart-thumping adventures.

He has been lost in the jungles of Thailand with no food and water for 12 hours during a birding trip gone wrong in 1987. Another time, in 2008, he emerged from Bintang Hijau Forest Reserve to find his car, parked on a lonely highway between Baling and Grik in Perak, surrounded by yellow tape and the blue and red flashing of police cars. Apparently a dead body was found in front of his car.

“When they told me, I said: ‘A dead man? Are you serious? It wasn’t there this morning!’ They soon realised I was just an innocent bird watcher, and then they advised me not to go into the forests alone as it was full of illegal logging camps and a crime base for people who go into Baling and Grik to steal stuff!”

Bakewell eventually pieced the story together, concluding that the body was that of a middle-aged illegal immigrant who probably died of natural causes. Apparently, body dumping in those parts was not an uncommon occurrence as illegal immigrants are unlikely to give their dead compatriots official burials.

Amazing experiences

Back in the 1970s, things were a little more subdued for Bakewell. He was seven and began following his father birding in Suffolk, England. Together they would stake out the “local patch”, a friendly park teeming with bird life.

As he grew older, Bakewell began to realise what he loved about the hobby. “What I love is nature as a whole. Nature is vast, overwhelming in fact, so interpreting just one little aspect of that, birds in this case, helps elucidate the bigger picture. The birds kind of unlock everything for me.”

In his early 20s, Bakewell realised that birding could unlock more than just an insight into nature. “I’ve been privileged to go to some incredible places and do some amazing things, and it’s all because of birds.”

His first trip abroad was when a group of fellow bird enthusiasts received some grant money for an ornithological expedition to China to work out the populations and migratory routes of Siberian, red-crowned, white-naped and hooded cranes.

The study site in Beidaihe, a district in Hebei province, happens to be where the coast and mountain ranges meet. This forms a natural funnel where breathtaking numbers of cranes would gracefully glide over the landscape.

Bakewell remembers the locals being amused by these odd binocular-wielding wai guo ren (foreigners), riding around on bicycles looking at birds.

When he told one of the waiters at a restaurant that one day the place would be crawling with tourists like him, the waiter laughed, saying, “Yeah right!”

That was in 1985 and today, that spot is world renowned. “It is now the premier site for watching bird migration in Asia, and we discovered it.”

Bakewell’s love for birds led him to find work with the non-profit Asian Wetlands Bureau (now known as Wetlands International), a job that eventually landed him in Malaysia. In 1990, he travelled to the Bay of Bengal to conduct surveys on water birds. Set up on a simple fishing trawler, they passed communities living on chars (silt islands); Bangladesh is one of the most crowded places on earth, so every bit of land is inhabited.

“For two weeks we lived amongst these incredibly poor communities, and curious locals would come up to look at our telescope. They’d form long queues to look in and out of it. It was a hugely novel experience for them, even the adults were slapping kids out of the way. It was just so off the beaten track, no tourist would ever do that!”

Birth of the conservationist

Getting to experience other cultures is not the only exciting thing which the world of birding opened up for Bakewell. In Bangladesh, his team saw the largest flock of spoon-billed sandpipers ever sighted. There were about 260 of them.

A small migratory Arctic wader with a spoon-shaped bill, it is now one of the rarest birds in the world. Thanks to hunting and habitat loss, the species is predicted to go extinct within 10 years.

“That day, we saw about as many spoon-billed sandpipers as exists in the world today, just in that one flock. Unfortunately, I don’t think anybody will ever see anything like that ever again.”

Bakewell has spent some 23 years birding in Malaysia – that has given him a first-hand account of declining bird populations here. He says that if you love birding, it is impossible not to end up as somewhat of a conservationist. “It almost happens by default. If you want to continue doing what you love, you want to make sure the places that you go will still be there in 20 years’ time.”

According to data from the Asian Water Birds Census, the warnings are in the numbers. “The best data we have is from water birds as it is very difficult to do proper counts of birds in the forest because you can’t see them. The findings show that for the 20 years between 1987 and 2007, overall water birds numbers have declined by 23% and in some areas, by over 85%.”

This is where bird watchers can make a difference, says Bakewell. “By simply listing their findings onto an online database, they can help build up baseline data.”

This can be done with ease through Bird-I-Witness, an Internet-based spatial database about birds collectively created by several global nature groups.

“You just submit information about what bird was seen, when and where. Anyone can submit their records,” says Bakewell. The local programme is administered by the Malaysian Nature Society and it allows users from anywhere in the world to input and query Malaysian bird data.

A mysterious duck

Sometimes, conservation happens inadvertently while in the pursuit of birds, such as Bakewell’s sighting of the itik laut. When he first started bird watching with the fishermen off Tanjung Dawai four years ago, they spoke of a mysterious bird.

“They described it as a black duck with webbed feet, very tame, sits on water and when it takes off, it runs along the water.” Bakewell thought it sounded like the short-tailed shearwater but that species is not known to come anywhere near Malaysia. When he did spot the bird, after two years of going out with the fishermen, indeed it was the short-tailed shearwater. It was the first documented sighting in Malaysia.

“Their migratory routes take them from their breeding grounds in Tasmania, up the east coast of Australia through the Indonesian archipelago and towards Japan. It was strange because coming through the Straits of Malacca leads to a dead end.”

It is still a mystery what these open water birds that do not normally come anywhere near land, aside from during the breeding season, are doing here. They come from May to mid-June. This year, Bakewell saw an unusually large number of them. At the same time, a scientist whom Bakewell found through the Internet says in Hong Kong, they recorded the lowest number of shearwaters passing through the South China Sea since records began.

A new breeding colony of the short-tailed shearwater has been recently discovered on the Recherché islands off the west coast of Australia and it is thought that these might be the birds sighted off Kedah.

Bakewell says because of the Internet, he could network with experts from other areas.

“I got an e-mail from a guy who’s thinking of fitting transmitters to the birds breeding in the Recherché islands. If we get a research grant, we may be able to take some feathers from these birds and do some isotope analysis to work out where they come from geographically. We’re trying to work out if there’s a pattern to the arrival and departure of breeding colonies.”

However, even before the mystery could be solved, the shearwaters off Tanjung Dawai have become literally sitting ducks.

“They are so tame. The fishermen will just dive into the water and pick them up for the cooking pot,” says Bakewell. When he heard about this, he set about making posters explaining the uniqueness of these birds.

With the fishermen’s help, the posters were pasted on all 18 boats operating from Tanjung Dawai. Once the locals understood the rarity of the birds, they stopped taking them home for dinner.

“We did it because it was just something to do,” says fisherman Zulkifli Ibrahim, 29. “It didn’t even taste that great, the meat was tough. But now that we know that this is endangering the population, we don’t do it anymore. It was just for a bit of fun,” he says, smiling.