For the watcher · A note alongside the program

The bay gives something back.

The Shorebird Steward Program is for the birds. That is what it teaches, what it measures, what its records exist to defend. But standing at the spot, at high tide, in proper light, beside another person doing the same, does something to the watcher. The research has now begun to describe what.

First movement

What attention does to the watcher.

A high tide watch is two hours. Not five minutes; two hours. Long enough that the body's pace falls in with the bay's pace, and the inner clatter quiets.

This is not a romantic claim. It is a measurable one. Sustained attention to the natural world produces what the research literature calls flow states, the same state experienced by musicians mid-performance, athletes mid-event, surgeons mid-procedure. In the work of Bratman and colleagues (PNAS, 2015), ninety minutes of attention to a natural environment produced reductions in rumination, the cycling of negative self-focused thought, and corresponding changes in the brain regions that house it.

The Steward who arrives at Kakadu Beach an hour before peak high, watches the godwits arrive in twos and threes from the feeding flats, settles them through to the tide turn, that Steward is doing fieldwork. The fieldwork is not, however, all that is happening.

Second movement

Encounter, not exposure.

There is a difference between being outdoors and meeting a bird.

The encounter, the actual moment when a particular Bar-tailed Godwit, landed in front of you, becomes a particular bird with a particular history rather than a generic shape, is the part the research has begun to isolate. Hammoud and colleagues (Scientific Reports, 2022) followed people across a working week and found that everyday encounters with birdlife produced time-lasting improvements in mental wellbeing, including in those with diagnosed depression. The effect was not dependent on rarity, scale, or species. It was the encounter itself that mattered, and it persisted after the encounter had ended.

The program does not ask Stewards to seek the encounter. It asks them to show up at the right tide and pay close enough attention that the encounter, when it happens, is recognised. The encounter does the rest.

Third movement

Beside another person doing the same.

Stewards do not work alone. They work alongside.

The two-day field camp at Jacobs Well is the obvious example, but it is not the principal one. The principal one is the slower fact that across a season, the Stewards working the same set of sites come to know one another's writing, through the records they file, the disturbances they note, the corrections they bring back from the waterline. They form what the literature calls a community of practice, a small group, serious, defined by the work itself rather than by demographic accident. White and colleagues (Scientific Reports, 2019) documented that participation in such groups produces durable improvements in social connection that outlast the activity that brought the group together.

The relationships outlast the season. The Stewards from a given cohort, three years on, still know one another. The bay, in this respect, is a maker of friendships of a specific kind: friendships built at the waterline rather than around a meeting room table.

Why this belongs here

The watcher is part of the work.

The Shorebird Steward Program is built on a principle the program calls WITH-not-ABOUT. The Steward learns about the bird by being with the bird, at the spot, repeatedly. The bay is not a subject the Steward observes from a distance; it is a place the Steward enters, attends to, and is shaped by. That shape is what the program calls Science to Kin, the path from understanding what the bird is to recognising that the bird is kin.

What this page describes is not a separate benefit grafted onto the program. It is the steward-side of the same work. A person who watches Moreton Bay carefully, week after week, in the company of others doing the same thing, is changed by the watching. The program does not ask the Steward to seek the change. The change comes anyway, and the research is now beginning to document how.

The bay is good for the birds the Steward protects. It is also good for the Steward. Both can be true at once without either being a sales pitch for the other.

References

  1. Bratman, G.N., Hamilton, J.P., Hahn, K.S., Daily, G.C., & Gross, J.J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1510459112
  2. Hammoud, R., Tognin, S., Burgess, L., Bergou, N., Smythe, M., Gibbons, J., Davidson, N., Afifi, A., Bakolis, I., & Mechelli, A. (2022). Smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment reveals mental health benefits of birdlife. Scientific Reports, 12, 17589. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-21537-1
  3. White, M.P., Alcock, I., Grellier, J., Wheeler, B.W., Hartig, T., Warber, S.L., Bone, A., Depledge, M.H., & Fleming, L.E. (2019). Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing. Scientific Reports, 9, 7730. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3

The birds are at the waterline. They have been arriving for thousands of years. The Steward who shows up to count them is, slowly and without intending to, also arriving somewhere.

For Shorebirds · Moreton Bay · Quandamooka Country