 Fairings have often been described as kind of edge, edge birds, it's an edge preference where they like foraging in the open, but they need the dense shrubs to hide in. So where you've got that combination, it's where they're happiest. So this for instance is good for nesting, quite dense but not super dense. Next to open areas where the birds like to forage. This project which has now been going for about 35 years, you realise that there probably is no such thing as normal. When they're nesting that's the busy time of year for me to keep on top of all the nest locations. We band all the chicks in the nest, we take a blood sample so we can look at paternity. The bands allow us to track individuals across their entire life and effectively follow their stories. It means that we can follow them from fledging through to adulthood. We can see what the family groups look like, who's friends with who, who's partnered with who. At the moment there are about 200 birds in the study population, divided into about 80 territory. We try to know about every single nesting attempt that the birds here make and so then we get an idea of how successful they've been. There's a young male there who's only got a few blue feathers. He's still got lots of malting to do. The aim of the project has changed a bit with time as we've learnt more about the birds. It began initially because the superb ferrieren is a cooperative breeder where you don't just have a breeding pair but you have others in the family group that stick around and help defend the territory, help look after the young. The superb ferrieren is notoriously salanderous. I think about three quarters of young are not sired by the male at home. We have a pedigree picture which won't make sense to almost anyone except the people involved in the project and you can see the really successful lineages that we've witnessed over the last 35 years. There she is. And that's her yell. She's seen us. They certainly know this action and then once you do that at them then they keep a closer eye on you and you can hear that's probably the female. There's just a pair living here that don't have any helpers. That's one of the surprising and one of the most rewarding things about this job has been learning to understand their vocalisations and they have a huge range of calls. You could walk around with your eyes closed and still have a good idea of what's going on and the sounds you hear. The climate has really been quite variable over that time period and we've seen really big changes in the population accordingly. For a very common bird that we don't think is in any danger we have seen a really big decline in the last 30 years where they have bounced back recently. We don't really know the reasons why that has happened and so I'm using genetics to try and test a few possible reasons for that. It's not just the fairer ends that keep me interested it's figuring out everything else that's going on around me. And it's also really special to be able to work with this kind of long term data. I was working with samples in the lab the other day that are older than I am which is really cool.