(Bird) Food for thought

At this time of year I tend to get through the post a steady trickle of catalogues, reminding me of the mailing lists to which I still need to unsubscribe. Qutie a few of these are wildlife related, with a good chunk given over to the £200M wild bird food industry. For a while now I’ve felt rather uneasy about the excessive commodification of what should be a simple act - attracting birds to the garden just to enjoy their company. At my most cynical, I see it as a further sign that we (in the UK particularly) are often more inclined to lavish love, affection, and free food on animals, than on people in need. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dispute the enormous pleasure that feeding birds can bring. We’ve fallen out of the habit somewhat, but have in the past regularly refilled feeders with nuts and seeds, probably most rewardingly when we lived just outside York and were eaten out of house and home by the tree sparrows that had no qualms about visiting our window-mounted feeder. I know many other people, cutting across ages and socioeconomic backrgounds, who do the same, delighting in the occasional stars - the woodpeckers, nuthatches and siskins - but equally pleased to see the everyday bluetits, starlings and greenfinches.

I’m convinced that this connection with nature benefits the human observers, whether on a large rural estate or an inner city balcony, which tying in to the growing evidence for the psychological benefits of urban green space. There is a clear conservation context too. My cherished tree sparrows, for example, are a classic farmland specialist that suffered, like so many of our birds, from agricultural intensification - to such an extent that, for every tree sparrow in the UK today there were perhaps 20 in the 1970s. This is indicative of broad trends in a range of UK birds, with recent attention focusing on how declines in common, widespread species may be overlooked by conservation agencies celebrating increases in rare species. So yes, looking after birds, whether by providing habitat or supplemental food, seems unequivocally to be a Good Thing.

And yet, leafing through the glossy new catalogues, that uneasy feeling returns: that providing the means for birds to consume is really an excuse for us to consume, conspicuously; to bind ourselves still tighter to the tiller of the good ship capitalism.

First, there is the capital outlay, with feeders starting at around £7 but quickly increasing to £30+. And of course you will need a range of feeders to attract different species at different times of years, arranged on an attractive stand (available separately). And have you thought about protecting them from squirrels / cats / parakeets? You could merrily fill your basket with well over £100 worth of hardware, even if you resist the temptation of weather-proof motion-triggered night vision cameras and decide not to indulge your garden’s mammals and invertebrates too. Looking at a product like the adjustable ground feeding sanctuary (£29.99) does make me wonder if we’re in danger of turning our wild birds rather, well, soft…

Then, of course - of course! - there is the food itself. I used to buy birdseed from a local shop, and the birds seemed to appreciate it. But the pages of the catalogue now read like the stock list of a high-end supermarket - premium sunflower hearts, feeder mix extra, nyjer seed, premium peanuts (a colleague who knows about such things once told me that peanuts arriving in the UK are graded, and only those not fit for bird consumption pass into the human food supply chain…), mealworms, nibbles and suet. For goodness sake. I have a similar response - it’s just a bloody cat!! - when watching adverts for ‘luxury’ cat food. (Harry & Paul’s I saw you coming sketches also come to mind…)

Prices start at around £2-3 a kilo for basic mixes, slightly less if you’re prepared to buy in bulk (e.g. 25kg of sunflower hearts will set you back just £65), but you can pay over £5 a kilo for buggy nibbles and £5 for just 100g of mealworms. To put this in context, my local grocer is currently selling potatoes for 50p a kilo; pasta is around £1.20 a kilo and rice a bit more (perhaps £2-£3 a kilo) - and a litre of sunflower oil, which apparently contains 4-5kg of seeds, is about £1.50. And of course, all of this food needs to be grown somewhere, land which is as a result unavailable to grow food for people - or, for that matter, to be turned over to other conservation purposes.

Of course, treating the birds and the bees well is in some ways a reasonable measure of collective worth as a society (more reasonable, I would argue, than GDP); and turning our gardens, big or small, into wildlife havens is for a variety of reasons an excellent example of enlightened self interest too. I’m not for a moment suggesting we stop. But with more than 10% of the world’s human population going hungry, and with an shameful number in my own country - in my own city - reliant on foodbanks, I cannot shake this feeling that we are straying away from the simple pleasure of caring for the birds, and towards more ethically dubious position of pampering them.

Ecologists as rock stars? Oh how I wish it were so…

The annual meeting of the British Ecology Society last week was unusual in a couple of ways: it was held in France, as a joint meeting with Societé Française d’Écologie; and, for the first time since I started going in the late 1990s, I wasn’t there. Rather than throw an almighty sulk about the injustice of this, I followed #BESSfe on Twitter as best I could, and felt I got a reasonable flavour of the conference - minus the hangovers, as an added bonus. For the most part, the tweets complied to the standard model for an academic meeting, with nuggets of useful information and plugs for new papers interspersed with Christmas jumper selfies and tales of boozing and carousing. All good stuff. But one morning a flurry of missives appeared all claiming some kind of affinity between ecologists and rock stars. I’m not sure of the context of this, and I’m sure it made sense at the time, but from this side of la Manche (and for the purposes of the straw man I wish to construct…) it provided what our glorious leader might call a genuine Lots Of Love moment. Let me tell you something. Over the years I have become reasonably proficient at a number of things, ecology (I hope) being one. But there are only two activities at which I think I might have got close to being exceptional. The first of these - catching a tennis ball rebounded at terrifying velocity off a fiendishly uneven stone wall - has not proved as marketable as I hoped through the 1990s whilst putting in my Gladwellian 10,000 hours (although I occasionally still impress myself, at least, with an astonishing reflex catch when playing with the kids). The second is songwriting. Nothing would please me more than to believe that, despite the lack of recording contract and adoring fan base that I once dreamt of (OK, still do; of course I still do), I had somehow ended up in the rockstar career I craved. But I so haven’t. As one of my undergraduate project students told me the other day, “I found the data collection really repetitive and boring”. Rock’n’roll.

Don’t get me wrong: with the failure of all my early ambitions in sport, music, cowboying, spaceflight, and so on, I’m pretty content to have ended up in the job that I have. And I think it’s important to communicate to kids that scientific research is an acievable, creative, satisfying, and respected career option - a good aspiration, if you will, to rank alongside medicine, teaching, architecture, and so on. But let’s not rush to supplant ambitions of Jedi knighthood, world cup winning, or, you know, rock stardom, too soon.

However, the more I thought about this, the more I realised that the parallels between ecology and the music biz are actually pretty clear. To wit:

• Incomprehensible veneration for old white dudes who were brilliant in their youth but have done nothing of worth in four decades or more, and who are now more likely to embarrass than entrance;
• Obsession with scouring early and obscure work for an under-appreciated idea that could profitably be repackaged for a modern audience;
• Equal opportunity routes to stardom. Except for women. Helps to be white too;
• Cynical marketing of trivial ephemera frequently trumps genuine originality and talent;
• Constant fretting over who should pay for the whole enterprise, and how these costs should be fairly divided between talent, administrators, publishers;
• Purse strings and mainstream media coverage largely in the control of men who grew up in the 1970s and who are deeply suspicious of any innovations to have developed since then;
• A deep distrust of the ‘mainstream’ from those preferring more obscure work; and vice versa;
• A tradition of large gatherings once or twice a year, ostensibly to broaden one’s horizons and hear new stuff, but in reality an opportunity for intoxication whilst establishment figures rehash their greatest hits;
• A very strong likelihood that, rather than basking in adoration from an arena stage, you will spend your career performing to small, largely uninterested audiences in stuffy rooms with bad acoustics;
• The occasional feeling of something approaching transcendence, encouraging you to forgive the whole sorry business for all its faults and to struggle on for one more year…

Compiling this, it’s a thrill to realise that I have achieved everything I ever dreamed of, and I can put the guitars on ebay in the New Year…

Happy holidays!

A Case for Anonymous Open Review

I recently reviewed a manuscript for the pioneering journal PeerJ. This presented me with a quandary. PeerJ’s experiment in open reviewing is nicely outlined in their recent post, and includes two steps: reviewers can sign their reports, and authors can publish the review history alongside their accepted paper. My quandary was this: I love the second idea, and think it is an important step forward in opening up the peer review process; but I don’t like to sign my reviews. Not because I want to hide behind anonymity - clearly, writing this post shows that I’m not going to any great lengths to hide my identity from the authors of the PeerJ manuscript - but rather because I think remaining anonymous makes me, personally, a better reviewer. So, on this occasion - despite producing what I consider to be a ‘good’ review, in that it was both pretty thorough, and very positive - I declined to sign. To explain why, here’s some history.

It started with so-called ‘double blind’ review, whereby manuscripts are anonymised before being sent to review. Or rather, it started with an argument about double-blind review. A paper said it benefited female authors. We disputed the evidence, and, although I know I’m predisposed to come down on my side of the argument, I honestly cannot see how anyone else can fail to agree with us - just look at our figure!!! And anyway, at a practical level how can it help, when only reviewers are blinded but editors make all the key decisions?

But I digress…

Thinking about double-blind review in turn led me to think about what I’d prefer to see in peer review, and openness seemed the way forward. At that time, only the first of PeerJ’s options was available, and for a while I started to sign all my reviews.

Well, I say ‘all’, but I noticed a trend: I was reluctant to sign my most critical reviews. This seems like basic human nature - it’s evident still in PeerJ, where reviewers are far less likely to sign reviews recommending rejection (see fig 5 here) - but is perhaps worth exploring more closely.

My particular field is relatively small, and I often know the authors of the manuscripts I review, at least well enough to say ‘hello’ to at conferences, sometimes much better than that. I have never seen this as a conflict of interest - I provide honest reviews whoever the author, and I have absolutely panned the work of some senior authors of very high standing - as well as some quite good friends - whose work I usually respect. I am much more comfortable doing this anonymously, not because there is anything in my comments that I would not, if forced, say to the face of the lead author; but simply because I would rather not be placed in that situation.

Yes, it all comes down to avoiding socially awkward situations. I will do almost anything to avoid face-to-face awkwardness. I am not one of those people who delights in pointing out a fatal flaw in someone’s work in the Q&A after a talk. I will find a million euphemisms for ‘crap’ if asked to comment on a (hypothetical, of course!) colleague’s substandard work. Whether you see that as a good or a bad quality in me probably depends on your cultural upbringing, but the simple fact is that I find the option of anonymity very appealing.

And so, having come to the conclusion that I preferred to remain anonymous when writing critical reviews, I felt the only morally consistent position for me to take was not to sign any reviews. Sometimes this is difficult. If I write an especially insightful (read: long) review of a piece by someone I really admire, it’s definitely tempting to sign. But no. Joey doesn’t share food, and Tom doesn’t sign reviews. Frankly - and I’m not suggesting for a moment that this is true of everyone - I think this makes me a better reviewer.

The other reason given for signing reviews is that it enables you to gain appropriate credit for your reviewing activity. I don’t really buy this - what kind of credit are you expecting? And how much? Let’s face it, writing a review can be hard work, but it’s much less demanding than writing the damn paper in the first place. My worry is that chasing formal credit encourages early career researchers to spend too long on reviews. I reviewed for Science a while back, and treated it with due seriousness: my review was several pages long, and really thorough, I thought. The other review stated, essentially: “Nah, not a Science paper”. I’m not saying this second review is something to aspire to, but you do need to learn to apportion time appropriately, and if you think a manuscript has very little merit, you probably don’t need six pages to say so.

Also: from whom are you expecting this credit from reviewing? You can already easily summarise your reviewing activity on your CV; I’m simply not convinced that adding a doi for each review will drastically increase your employment prospects or standing in the community. Or at least, it’s not something I feel I need at this point. For those who want credit, and feel like a doi gives them that, then of course it’s great to have the option.

I wouldn’t want any of the above to suggest that I am in any way against openness in peer review, which has numerous benefits. I would be delighted to see my (anonymous) reviews appended to published papers. There is of course an editorial issue here - it’s probably more useful to publish an essay-style review, à la Peerage of Science, than a numbered list of typos; and my experience is that many reviews themselves are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Who will review the reviews?! But in principle, yes, let’s open up the process. Transfer of reviews between journals - another form of openness, adding memory to the review process - is becoming more common too, especially within publishing houses, which is great, and ought to help avoid the kind of situation I wrote about here.

My point is that open, civil, and constructive reviews can still be conducted under anonymity. For the sake us shrinking violets who value its protection, I hope the publishing pioneers at PeerJ and elsewhere retain it as an option.