From a youthful dream of travelling to Africa to the culmination of a research project carried out over more than ten seasons in Kenya, the author takes the reader on a journey as a member of a group of biologists determined to find out why some bir...
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Scientific achievements
Throughout the book I have referred to some of the major milestones of our research as we checked nest boxes site after site, year after year. I have highlighted the variety of animals that have appeared in the boxes: honeybee hives, wasp nests, ant nests, large spiders, reptiles, bats, mongooses, hornbills.... Almost everything except what we were looking for: starlings. Given these results, many will think that we have failed dismally in our main objective. And so it was, without any mitigating argument; apart from a few egg clutches and the presence of a few feathers in the nests of Hildebrandt's and greater blue-eared starlings in some savannah localities, no information on this family of birds came out of our boxes to allow us to delve deeper into our initial hypotheses.
But with a broader biological perspective, which a researcher must always have, there was no breakdown in our work. On the contrary, the scenario of multiple occupants to which I have just referred allowed us to recycle our ideas and generate new hypotheses. Science often advances thanks to serendipity, i.e. relevant findings that occur by chance or accident, and this is what happened in our case. Neither Vicente, Wamiti, nor I had any idea when we put up the nest boxes that any group of animals other than birds could use them regularly and frequently. Nor was there any documented information on the subject, especially in tropical ecosystems, which are much less well studied than those in temperate regions. All the evidence suggested that the scenario of a multitude of creatures interested in our artificial nest sites was a true reflection of what happens in natural tree holes. In the tropics, animal diversity is very high and many species have to rely on them as a place to reproduce or as a permanent or occasional refuge. The boxes and the ladder had provided us with this novel but raw information. It was now up to the desk researchers to refine it.
The enormous amount of information, which filled many field notebooks, was finally summarised in two scientific articles, the references of which I give in case anyone is interested in consulting them:
1. José P. Veiga, Wanyoike Wamiti, Vicente Polo and Muchane Muchai (2013). Interaction between distant taxa in the use of tree cavities in African ecosystems: a study using nest-boxes. Journal of Tropical Ecology, volume 29. Pp. 187-197. DOI: 10.1017/S026646741300014X
2. José P. Veiga, Wanyoike Wamiti, Vicente Polo and Muchane Muchai (2013). Interphyletic relationships in the use of nesting cavities: mutualism, competition and amensalism among hymenopterans and vertebrates. Naturwissenchaften, volume 100. Pp. 827-834. DOI: 10.1007/s00114-013-1082-x
Non-scientific readers may wonder how hundreds of pages of field notebooks and extensive Excel spreadsheets can be reduced to nineteen printed pages. And the rest of the information? The answer lies in a familiar term: synthesis. Science tends to eliminate the superfluous and cut to the chase, highlighting results that are novel or add to our body of knowledge, sometimes just to show the weaknesses of a previous hypothesis, or to raise questions rather than provide answers.
