PhD’s evolve a lot from their initial concept. I’m not even all the way through my first year and my project has grown and adjusted a huge amount. This is for a few reasons…
- Mine is a field-intensive project about a few species we know very little about – some things we thought were possible haven’t been, and other things have emerged as interesting questions.
- I’ve done a lot of reading and figured out the direction I want to take with my questions.
- Shit happens.
- Good shit happens.
This delightful little seabird is a fairy prion (Pachyptila turtur). They’ve joined fluttering and little shearwaters as a species I’ll be studying for my PhD project. In northern New Zealand they breed only on the Poor Knights islands, but they have a huge population globally. We see them a lot at sea during spring and summer while they breed, and then they vanish over winter on migration. We see them feeding with big work-ups, just like fluttering and Buller’s shearwaters. They seem to be eating similar stuff, based on some work the Northern New Zealand Seabird Trust has done over the past year. Because this is such a perfect fit with the work I’m doing (and I helped out with a lot of the fieldwork on them last year), I’m picking up on the fairy prion project and running it into my PhD – which I’m super excited about! I love these little birds, and there’s so much to discover about them.
Being flexible and open to change is just as important in the academic side of my life as it is for photography. I haven’t had much time to work on images recently, but I have been thinking a lot about how to document my research more effectively, to tell stories about the work and the birds. It’s a big change from the serendipitous wandering in search of birds that I’ve done in the past, but taking a more thoughtful and planning approach has led to some interesting ideas that I can’t wait to make reality.
