Before I begin, I would like to thank Colleen McLinn, Robert Payo, and Jennifer Schaus for inviting me to particpate in this blog - many thanks guys.

The primary motivation behind any study (regardless of whether the study species is a bird or not) should be to address an interesting question. You know that coming up with a good question always starts by making observations about some phenomenon. Sounds easy, right? The truth is, it is easy to come up with some question (e.g. Why do birds fly? Why do House Sparrows eat primarily on the ground and not at my birdfeeder?), but defining a good question takes some thought.

Let’s deconstruct the process. Who is the intended audience? Is it Ornithologists (aka birdologists), an NSF granting agency, or possibly a fifth grade classroom? Certainly different groups have different interests and motivations. Ornithologists might be jazzed about addressing how forest fragmentation affects reproductive success of neotropical migratory songbirds because there is a major gap in our (science) collective knowledge about the impacts of human alterations to the landscape. Fifth graders on the other hand might be motivated to ask a basic question to get an idea of how the process of science works, such as, “do House Finches prefer to eat black oil sunflower seeds or thistle at bird feeders? You get the idea, right?

Okay, so we know who our intended audience will be and what kind of moitivation they have, so now we have to fine tune a question that actually interests us enough to pursue it. There are plenty of worthy questions out there in need of assesment, but if you are not sufficiently interested in finding out the answer, then chances are that the research will not be completed (or even worse, will not be done properly). So you should definitely address something that sounds “cool” to you.

Moving right along; our next step in the process of asking a question is deciding how realistic our expectations are. When I was a middle schooler, I would have thought that a cool school-based project might be determining how American Goldfinches assess predatory threats from terrestrial versus aerial predators. Hmmm, we have a bird feeder at school that is stocked with food and has plenty of Goldfinches every day. The problem is, how would I get an aerial and terrestrial predator to go along with my plans? Well mom might let me borrow Jules “the attack cat” for a day (but most likely not) and maybe I can lure in a Sharp-shinned or Cooper’s hawk with mom’s Parakeet (even more doubtful). In some situations, it will simply be impossible for you to adequetly address a “cool” question, given your resources. Yet, with a little ingenuity, you might just be able to pull it off. Okay, so I can’t get live predatory animals to work with, but I can get models (e.g. a stuffed animal cat and hawk) to act as surrogates. It might work and it might not, but any inferences that you make will be based upon using stuffed animals as a proxy for predators in your study. It might be worth a try.

We haven’t touched on what you will actually measure and how to analyze the data, but hopefully these elements will help you to be successful if you ever choose to come up with a research question.