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South Africa, World, Our Burning Planet

On a wing and a prayer: How perestroika put a Cape bird-lover on a fascinating new path

Biodiversity and Development Institute research assistant Itxaso Quintana weighing and measuring eggs. As the embryo develops within the egg the weight of the egg reduces, the ratio of egg weight to volume is used to calculate when the egg was laid and when it will hatch. (Photo: Rio Button)

By Rio Button for Roving Reporters

7 Oct 2021

Statistics professor Les Underhill has helped build a new model army of citizen scientists and is busy changing the way research is done while strengthening efforts to stave off extinctions. It all began with a trip to the tundra.

We peek over the jetty, scanning the rocky beach through binoculars, before ducking down to discuss in hushed voices our next move. We’re on Robben Island looking for African oystercatcher (Haematopus moquini) nests. This island is one of the few places where these charismatic shorebirds, that mate for life, can breed safely from the beachgoers’ dogs who terrorise their chicks.

By “we”, I’m referring to Les Underhill — the author of my first-year statistics textbook, head of the Biodiversity and Development Institute and retired University of Cape Town statistics professor — and I, a recently graduated conservation biologist. I’m learning to find the nests of the bright-red billed and glossy-black plumed birds who I will be monitoring for the rest of the summer breeding season.

oystercatchers robben island Biodiversity and Development Institute research assistant Itxaso Quintana (left) and Rio Button (right) weighing and measuring African oystercatcher eggs so they can calculate when they were laid and when they will hatch. As the embryo develops within the egg the weight of the egg reduces. (Photo: Les Underhill)

Russia and a revolution

Underhill teaches me a technique for finding nests that he perfected as a boy on Rondebosch Common, a 40ha conservation area in the Cape Town suburb where he grew up. It’s the very same know-how with which he wowed Russian scientists on his expedition to the Arctic. That trip was back in 1991, a few months before the breakup of the Soviet Union.

So how did a South African stats professor land an all-expenses-paid bird monitoring expedition to the Russian tundra as the guest of a country that was then, at the tail-end of the apartheid era, an implacable foe of his own country?

siberia Sharp-eyed readers will note the red knot (Calidris canutus) sitting on her nest near Lake Pronchishcheva, Taimyr Peninsula, Siberia. Explorers searched for the nests of this bird for decades before finding the first one in 1909. During his time in the tundra, University of Cape Town Statistical Sciences Emeritus Professor, Les Underhill had to find and monitor the nest of these cryptic creatures every three days. (Photo: Les Underhill)

The answer lies in Underhill’s knack for bringing together an enthusiasm for birds — which hatched when he was a boy — with statistical expertise developed during the course of a distinguished academic career. As he explains it, his aim has been to “put stats into biology and bring biology into stats”.

His pioneering work led Underhill to establish two organisations that track changes in nature, relying heavily on “citizen science” projects. These gather data over larger areas and for longer periods than any individual researcher could manage alone. Ultimately, they are helping to create a digital memory bank of plant and animal details, spanning Africa and drawing on the labours of generations of researchers and citizen scientists.

The depth and breadth of the database allows researchers to better examine patterns and track changes in a range of species. It means findings can be formulated more quickly, critical for conservation. And thanks to Underhill’s efforts, any regular Joe with a smartphone and access to the internet can become a nature enthusiast and contribute to conservation as a citizen scientist.

oystercatchers robben island The writer, Biodiversity and Development Institute research assistant Rio Button, labels, weighs, and measures African oystercatcher eggs on Robben Island. She uses the ratio of the volume to weight of the eggs to calculate when the eggs were laid and when they will hatch. (Photo: Les Underhill)

Early genesis

Underhill has never regarded birds, biology and the business of number-crunching to be odd bedfellows. Throughout his career as a statistician at UCT, he’s given wings to avian interests which originally “rubbed off” on him as a lad, thanks to his father who was an avid birdwatcher.

As a student, Underhill was part of the first successful wader research group in the southern hemisphere. (Waders are a group of birds that “wade” through sand or mud to find their food.)

“We caught and tagged tens of thousands of waders, mainly at Langebaan Lagoon,” he tells me, referring to the large saltwater lagoon on South Africa’s West Coast. As the group’s statistician, it was his task to analyse the vast amounts of data the group collected. And under the guidance of ornithologists, he published many scientific papers from that data.

African oystercatchers take a minimalist approach to nest architecture. Their nests are no more than shallow depressions known as ‘scrapes’. (Photo: Rio Button)

Welcome, comradeski!

Among the annual visitors to the lagoon are a number of wader species that make the long-haul flight (a cool 30,000km round trip) from their breeding grounds in Russia’s barren, frozen tundra to holiday by the white sandy beaches and turquoise waters of Langebaan. And the papers that followed on the birds did not pass unnoticed by the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences. In time, an invitation from the Soviets landed on Underhill’s desk and he joined the expedition that would change the course of his career.

“Bear in mind,” he recalls, “that statisticians are supposed to sit in their offices analysing the data that other people collect. I was desperately lucky to be the person who got the invitation to join the expedition to the tundra. The tundra was not where the average person would choose to go on vacation. It was tough and demanding fieldwork, but it was outdoors and it was indescribably beautiful. That trip to the tundra, 30 years ago, changed my life.”

Back in the RSA

Returning home, Underhill switched the focus of his research.

Previously he had mainly used his statistical expertise to solve mathematical problems, but now he wanted to use it more to answer biological questions that would contribute to a better understanding of nature and, ultimately, its conservation.

mole snake robben island Biodiversity and Development Institute research assistants found this mole snake about to tuck into an African oystercatcher egg. (Picture: Itxaso Quintana)

He began plotting to establish a unit that would let him do this for the benefit of birds. And before the year was over, he’d launched the Avian Demography Unit. With more biology students in the unit studying a range of animals, its name changed to the Animal Demography Unit, or ADU as it became generally known. In 2005, the ADU launched the Virtual Museum.

Valuable database

Instead of biological specimens on shelves or in bottles, like in traditional museums, the Virtual Museum collects, digitally stores, organises and analyses digital records of animals, fungi and plants from sightings recorded across Africa. The records date to 1726 and include databases of dragonflies, birds, mushrooms, fish, scorpions, frogs, trees and much more.

Today the museum is co-managed by UCT’s FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology and the Biodiversity and Development Institute, which Underhill founded in 2015. Underhill’s institute is independent of UCT and aims to foster research and community action in biodiversity conservation as well as social development.

While locked down in the Western Cape, South Africa citizen scientist GJ Begemann photographed this Amethyst Sunbird (Nectarinia amethystina). By contributing the photograph to the Virtual Musuem’s BirdPix we get not only records of the bird, but of the flowers it feeds on. (Photo: Supplied)

The records are digitally stored and organised in the Virtual Museum. In April this year, its servers narrowly missed destruction during the fires that ravaged Table Mountain. But backups are kept in off-campus databases — a vital record that lets researchers track species’ movements and population numbers. It helps researchers detect changes out of line with the natural cycles. They can then sound the alarm, warning government departments, conservation agencies and research groups so they can respond, hauling species away from the precipice of extinction.

Treasure trove

Underhill credits citizen scientists with collecting a treasure trove of biodiversity data, a multitude of fragments of information that help professional researchers with their work.

“We build the jigsaw puzzle of biodiversity from all the pieces, and transform millions of bits of data into information that can be acted on," Underhill explains.

He encourages people to open their eyes and truly notice and appreciate the incredible life around them. He reasons that by engaging people’s fascination with nature, they are more likely to value and protect it.

African oystercatchers live on the sunny beaches of southern Africa. They are monogamous and can mate for life. Couples share parenting responsibilities and even once their chicks can fly they must keep feeding them. They feed their chicks until their little beaks become strong enough and they have mastered the technique of opening up the mussels and limpets they eat themselves. Despite more than 60% of African oystercatcher eggs not surviving to hatch at their breeding stronghold on Robben Island, African oystercatcher populations are stable and remain a species of least concern on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list since they moved there from the near-threatened in 2017. (Photo: Callum Evans)

“Nature” doesn’t necessarily refer to the great outdoors. Citizen science may be about identifying the gecko on your kitchen ceiling, the beetle in your flower pot or the birds drinking nectar in your garden. This was especially true during last year’s Covid-19 lockdown, when a deluge of “at home” entries poured in. They would prove valuable, helping Underhill and his team better understand how wildlife uses urban spaces.

How does it work?

It’s easy to contribute to the institute and the unit’s projects. Citizen scientists typically snap photos of organisms and upload them with the details of where and when they found them. Some specially trained citizen scientists catch and release birds to gather information about birds’ health, size, weight and moult stage.

They put a ring with a unique code around a bird’s foot, so it can be identified and information about it collated if the bird is recaught. This information is valuable for understanding how climate change is affecting birds’ natural movements and health.

Though African oystercatchers are charismatic, colourful and easy to spot, their cryptic eggs and chicks are not. (Pictures: Itxaso Quintana [left] and Rio Button [right]).

Behind the scenes, the institute’s researchers manage the data collected, add historical records and analyse it, joining the dots and giving context and meaning to the work of an ever-growing community of citizen scientists.

Staying connected

Underhill, a spry 74-year-old who is active on Facebook and Instagram, delights in piquing curiosity about nature among his army of citizen scientists, friends and followers. “There are no stupid questions,” he reckons, and enthusiastically engages with queries, big and small.

He hosts events, sends newsletters and holds conferences to keep his community of more than 2,000 citizen scientists up to date with new developments. And there was little let-up for Underhill during the lockdown. He initiated Biodiversity and Development Institute virtual citizen scientist hours and events online. Guest speakers, from Siberia to Seychelles, presented on topics spanning everything from seabirds to seahorses, and citizen scientists from across Africa attended religiously.

Through the Biodiversity and Development Institute and the Animal Demography Unit their founder, University of Cape Town Statistical Sciences Professor Les Underhill (second from left) has supervised many doctoral students. They include Megan Lofitie-Eaton (left), Zingfa Wala (second from right) and Alicia Nickless (right), who received their doctorates in 2018 thanks to his guidance. (Photo: Supplied)

New tricks

Underhill embraced bleeding edge blockchain technology, partnering the Biodiversity and Development Institute with the tech start-up Wildcards, a conservation fundraising organisation.

In less than a year, Wildcards raised $18,000 for the institute. The platform lets funders support the institute by becoming the guardians to tokens of virtual animal cards of species the institute helps conserve in real life. Every month, guardians make subscription donations to the institute. The institute will use these crypto-currency windfalls to continue its work.

Jason Smythe, a Wildcards co-founder, explains: “Wildcards aims to facilitate the intersection of economics, altruism and community to break down the traditional barriers to conservation fundraising.”

Powerful force

This African Blue Pansy (Junonia orithya madagascariensis) was photographed and logged by citizen scientists IC Sharp & A Sharp in KwaZulu-Natal in 2008. It is one of the butterfly species whose westward shift has been detected thanks to the contributions of citizen scientists to the Virtual Musuem’s LepiMAP project. This project generates distribution maps for species based on photographic records. (Photo: Supplied)

African Blue Pansy (Junonia orithya madagascariensis) butterflies are moving west. The shift in their distribution has been detected thanks to the contributions of citizen scientists to the Virtual Musuem’s LepiMAP project.

Underhill believes the citizen science community is a force to be reckoned with. The data it collects is of real scientific value and it facilitates conservation planning and the setting of priorities. By getting involved in hands-on projects, people become alert to changes in habitats. This fosters civic awareness, especially as the places where we used to find birds and butterflies disappear.

Underhill wants to strengthen groups who are aware of the value of the environment and motivated to protect wildlife and wild spaces. He wants to give them a way to participate in conservation science.

A good example of this is LepiMAP, a Virtual Museum citizen science project that has assisted researchers to detect a westward shift in many butterfly species in South Africa. Could the move be linked to climate change, pesticides, pollution or predators?

Institute and unit researchers are investigating.

UCT Super-charged by hot temperatures and swirling winds, on Devil’s Peak, a blaze sweeps through a University of Cape Town building, near the one that houses the computer servers for the Virtual Museum. The servers kept running through the crisis and citizen scientists, unaware of the drama, continued happily uploading photos to databases housed a mere 50m from the fire. As it happens, the databases are backed up off campus. (Photo: Supplied by the Biodiversity and Development Institute)

Success story

But biodiversity monitoring is not only about recording the demise of species and scrambling to stave off extinctions — as important as this work is. It is also about detecting the recovery of species.

During my summer monitoring African oystercatchers, I stumbled one day, nearly stepping on a monstrously large mole snake, an egg-shape bulging just behind its neck. The snake was near a nest where, on an earlier visit, I had seen an egg.

I spied many more such fat mole snakes on Robben Island. Often they were trolling above the high tide mark, near where I had previously found other oystercatcher nests, inconspicuous among the shells with their cryptic, mottled eggs. More often than not, the nests were empty — and this, long before the chicks were due to hatch. Indeed, we subsequently established that less than 40% of eggs hatched.

I feared the island’s many mole snakes had been breakfasting on eggs, tipping the delicate balance of nature and sending African oystercatchers spiralling back to near threatened status, where they had languished from 2004 to 2016, and also in the 1980s. But, it turns out, with the perspective of two decades of Robben Island breeding figures and citizen science data from the Biodiversity and Development Institute, that the African oystercatcher is doing well. Populations are on the rise and the birds are spreading their wings, as it were — the areas where they are found have been expanding.

eggs Biodiversity and Development Institute research assistant Itxaso Quintana weighing and measuring eggs. As the embryo develops within the egg the weight of the egg reduces, the ratio of egg weight to volume is used to calculate when the egg was laid and when it will hatch. (Photo: Rio Button)

So what was that technique Underhill taught me for pinpointing nests — the one he also wowed the Russian researchers with 30 years ago?

Well, it works like this: When you spot a bird sitting far away, hopefully on its eggs, remember that as soon as it sees you, it’s going to try to lure you away. So, quick as a wink, you find points and objects in the landscape and draw an imaginary line through them and the bird. Then stick to that line.

Sooner rather than later the bird will see you coming and try to lead you astray. Go slowly and carefully. The eggs are really well camouflaged and you don’t want to step on them.

Keep your eye on the prize. OBP/Roving Reporters

This story forms part of a Roving Reporters biodiversity reporting project, supported by the Earth Journalism Network. Rio Button is a marine biologist, commercial diver and surfer and regular correspondent for Roving Reporters. She has a Master’s of Science degree in Conservation Biology from the University of Cape Town. She is also the chief conservation officer at Wildcards.

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