 There's a deep sense of satisfaction and sort of peace and, you know... If I could do a couple of somewisers a day, that would be brilliant. I would really make my day. In the end you realise you're sharing the same world. People ask me this all the time and I, you know, people say, why are you interested in birds? And it's like asking me why I'm right-handed. It is an obsession and I think it's the excitement and the rush that you get from seeing an individual bird, especially if you're going for it. Trying to eliminate birds just for fun, I think, is something that doesn't seem well with my conscience. There's this something that is noxious in Philippine culture. The way young boys are raised, we call it the slingshot culture. That's what I would like to eliminate. And that these young boys are taught the joys of hunting birds, whatever kind of bird. With slingshots, a terrible way to raise boys or children. With the way we're losing endemic species in the Philippines, for example, or we're losing birds. They say that birds are pests, especially in the rice fields, but there's a balancing mechanism by nature that actually is at work. One of the attitudes towards birds in rice fields is that if it flaps, you're scared away. Thinking that all birds eat rice and will cause damage to rice fields, when that's just not true. It needs to be much, you need to look at it much more on a species level to understand what birds will eat rice and when they eat rice and when they're just in there for other reasons. The majority of birds seen in rice fields from my research are insectivorous, so they're solely going to the rice field because they're attracting invertebrates to eat. You don't really know how wild a bird is until you've held it in your hand or when you've held a wild wader or a parrot in your hand or a barbit which twists its head around and tries to bite your finger on. That's a wild animal. You can really see the dinosaur in that when you've got it in your hand. You do have this extraordinary combination of a beautiful bird and that just feathers are amazing things. Feathers are just quite incredible structures with interesting calls sometimes. Beautiful songs as some call them singing a few minutes ago. Plus this extraordinary biology and the history of the animals. The whole aesthetic is just fantastic. It really impresses lots of buttons for me. The biggest rumour and the biggest myth that I hopefully will dispel at the end of my PhD would be that not all birds eat rice and that to spend so much time and effort in scaring away all birds not only doesn't help the ecosystem but it also is a waste of resources. When push comes to shove, I'm a bird and that's the thing that defines me more than anything else. It's something that does not really remind me of the stress and the rigors of my job but it also teaches me a lot of things and values that I use in my job like patience, like the power of observation, the power of sympathy and empathy the value of interacting with your environment whether it's in an environment of people or an environment of non-people.