Observation as Conservation: Field Notes from a Living Archive

Najika Akane
Apr 5, 2025
4 min read

Updated: Apr 26, 2025

What We Notice Matters

A note on observation, impact, and belonging

I used to record birds to stay organised—to catalogue the species I’d encountered, to trace the shape of my days. They felt like quiet bookmarks in time, small proofs of presence. At first, it was practical. Then it became something else.

I became enraptured by their personalities—the way some watched back, the way others came undone mid-glance, like threads unspooling back into the landscape. I began sketching them. Writing about them. Letting their appearances thread themselves through my artwork, my thoughts, my attention.

What began as a private archive became a thread in a much wider net—one I didn’t realise I’d joined.

Each observation I log now becomes part of an invisible system: a shifting, living map of biodiversity. A record of what still exists. A quiet warning of what doesn’t. These aren’t just memories anymore. They’re data. And not just any data—individual, irreplaceable contributions to conservation, to science, to the stories we’re still trying to understand before they vanish.

It doesn’t require credentials—just care. What holds the system together isn’t expertise. It’s presence.

Everyone contributes.

Everyone matters.

We are the net, and we are the ones holding the threads.

Value of Data

On Bearing Witness

By April of 2025, I had submitted over 450 observations, documenting 182 unique species, including four notable rarities—each significant in its own way, though two stand out in particular.

Male Spectacled Eider — Spectacled Eider, Texel Netherlands

The first was a Spectacled Eider—a high-arctic sea duck that somehow made landfall in the Netherlands. It was the first confirmed record in the country’s history, and within days, it drew thousands of birders from across Europe, gathering at the shoreline with scopes, field guides, and awe. The bird had already drawn attention by the time I arrived, but logging it felt like adding my thread to a moment already spinning into history.

I added my sighting to the record—and became part of a much bigger story unfolding.

The second was quieter: an Oriental Cuckoo, sighted alone in the Pioneer Dairy Wetlands in Wyong. It hadn’t been recorded there for over a decade. There were no crowds. Just a dead tree, a low mist, and a brief moment of recognition before it slipped back into the latticework of branches and leaves.

It doesn’t feel like much, submitting one observation at a time. But it is. Especially when it’s careful. When you offer context, photographs, location, and time. These fragments shape the map— of where birds are, where they’ve been, and where they’ve quietly disappeared.

We are losing species we haven’t even noticed.

Observation slows the vanishing.

And every person with a camera, a field journal, or just a sharp memory can add something irreplaceable to the record.

If you’ve seen something rare, you can report it to NSW ORAC. If you’ve seen something common, submit it to Observation.org or https://ebird.org. What’s ordinary now may not always be.

Every sighting is a thread.

And the net only holds if we keep weaving.

Not every record needs to be extraordinary. It only needs to be honest. Presence is enough.

How to Contribute

Become part of the thread

Perhaps you’ve seen them:

A pair of Rainbow Lorikeets—brilliant, reckless things—darting through the canopy with a shriek and a shimmer. Or an Ibis, slow and deliberate, grazing beside you like it belonged there before the path did.

If so, you’ve already done the most important thing.

You noticed.

Turning that moment into something lasting—something useful—is simpler than it seems.

Several tools exist to help you turn sighting into record, memory into data:

Observation — A quiet, flexible app that syncs with observation.org, allowing you to log not just species, but behaviour, numbers, and mood. A digital field notebook, if you let it be.
Merlin Bird ID — A field guide that listens. It can show you which birds are likely nearby, based on your location and the season—useful when you don’t yet know who’s calling from the trees.
In Australia, its sound ID features are still learning, especially in NSW—but every confirmed recording you add helps shape the future of its accuracy.
eBird — A global project, structured and vast. It tracks your sightings and effort and folds them into datasets used by scientists, conservationists, and land managers. The language of it is clinical, but the purpose is anything but.