Even a Herring Gull is a Good Bird by Yiqin

Biodiversity VIP
May 13
6 min read

I don’t know how many people take the Biodiversity Literacy module in their final year at University of St Andrews—but I did.

And strangely, it gave me an answer to a question I had been thinking about as a graduating student:

What does St Andrews actually mean to me?

I’ve been thinking about this for almost my entire final year. Soon I’ll be leaving Scotland for a very, very long time, and I keep reflecting on what these four years have really been.

Is it love? Regret? Gratitude?Or just four years that passed too quickly to understand?

In my first year in St Andrews, I wrote a line for a play:“My love is lost—lost somewhere along Market Street, in the waves of East Sands, between the endless shelves of Tesco, on the number 99 bus, and in countless late nights rushing essays…”

I don’t know if I really lost anything here.But I do know that I gained something I didn’t expect.

I liked birds—but I didn’t really see them

I’ve always liked birds.

If I saw a new one, I would feel excited. If I was upset, I would go outside and look for them. Watching them stand, fly, or quietly rearrange their feathers somehow made things feel calmer.

My friend once asked me why I’m so obsessed with birds, and I said I had no reason. He said everything comes for a reason! He likes dogs because he grew up with them. That makes sense. But birds? I just… like them.

Maybe if I had to explain, I would say I like their freedom. They are small, but they cross continents. They live in a world that feels three-dimensional, while we stay mostly on the ground. They read the wind, avoid collisions in mid-air, migrate across half the planet every year. They are elegant, their feathers shine in the sunlight. Their bodies are the most perfect spindle shapes in the world.

But even then, that doesn’t fully explain it.

Figure 1 Quetzal, one of my favorite birds

And yet, despite liking birds, I didn’t really see them.

I’ve heard birdsong my whole life. Some people complain that birds are too noisy, especially in spring, when they start singing before sunrise. I have friends who joke about being woken up by a nightingale and wondering when it will finally “find a partner and stop.”

But for me, birdsong has always been the opposite.

I’ve struggled with sleep since I was young. Sometimes I lie awake all night. But if I stay up long enough, until the sky just begins to lighten, that moment slightly before sunrise, I start to hear birds.

And somehow, that’s when I finally fall asleep.

I still remember the birds I heard growing up in Shanghai, like the Light-vented Bulbul calling outside my window. Even now, I can recall those sounds clearly. At school, on quiet afternoons, or walking past small wooded areas, like along Lade Braes, I would hear countless birds hidden in the bushes. I heard them all the time.

But I never saw them.

I didn’t know what they looked like, what they were called, or how anyone could tell them apart.

If I spotted a bird on a branch, I would feel happy, but I never asked what it was. Maybe, in my mind, they were all just “sparrows.”

A gull was just a gull.A pigeon was just a pigeon.Everything was familiar, but indistinct.

The module didn’t change what I liked, it changed how I looked

Here I joined this module. I won’t say that the Biodiversity Literacy module suddenly make me love nature, but it did something more subtle: it changed the way I paid attention.

For the first time, I started noticing differences.

Not all gulls are the same. A Herring Gull is not a Common Gull. A Dunnock is no longer “a weird looking sparrow,” it’s something I can recognize, something I start to expect in certain places.

Figure 2 A Dunnock I’ve seen a thousand times

And then there are the small patterns: the same Blackbird I pass on my way home, always near the same spot. And near where I live, I can almost always find a Blue Tit, moving quickly between branches, never staying still for long. I realized I had been walking through the same places for three years without ever really seeing them.

Fieldwork: going places I didn’t even know existed

The module also forced me to go outside. Not just “go outside” in the sense of walking to class, but actually going to look.

This was new for me.

I used to love chemistry in school, but I hated experiments so much that I ended up choosing philosophy and mathematics, two subjects where you can sit in front of a laptop all day and type. So, I never imagined myself doing fieldwork.

And yet, here I was.

I found places I didn’t even know existed after four years in St Andrews:

A small pond near Andrew Melville Hall.

The edges of West Sands I had never explored.

Paths I had somehow missed completely.

Figure 3 I only found out in my fourth year that there’s a pond here.

It also made me realize something slightly embarrassing: fieldwork is physical work.

As someone who is not very sporty, this might have been the most exercise I’ve done in a module. Climbing, walking, standing for long periods, trying to identify plants in the wind, it’s not as easy as it looks. It definitely made me admire field biologists and ecologists much more.

And plant identification…that was another challenge entirely. I used multiple apps, guides, websites. Sometimes the names didn’t match. Sometimes nothing matched. It felt messy and frustrating in a way that lectures never are.

But at the same time, it made the experience more real. You don’t just “know” biodiversity, you struggle with it, question it, slowly get better at it.

Birds became my way in

If biodiversity was the method, birds were my way in. They were familiar enough that I didn’t feel completely lost, but complex enough that I could keep learning.

And slowly, something changed. Even the most common birds started to feel different. Rare species still feel exciting, but I realized something more important: Even the most common birds matter.

They are everywhere, all the time. They are ordinary, but not meaningless. Birdwatchers sometimes joke that the ‘Penguin’[i], will never let you go home empty-handed, because it’s so reliable and always there if you look carefully. That idea stayed with me.

[i]Of course it not a real penguin, it’s a Night Heron!

Figure 4 The "Penguin"Birding never needs rarity to feel joy.

A mallard is not just background.A crow is not just noise.

Even a herring gull is a good bird!

Birdwatching is an existential victory

There was a period in St Andrews when I wasn’t very happy, for various reasons, academic pressure, friendships, and everything in between. But I found that birdwatching could greatly improve this. It is an activity that exists completely outside systems of judgment. Being in nature feels light and free; even when I don’t see any birds, just feeling the wind on my skin or looking up at the sky is enough to make me relax.

Nature and birds exist entirely outside social systems of meaning and evaluation. They are not there to be liked. They are not performing.

They are simply there—existing.

And that existence is their meaning. Free from the frameworks and expectations of human society, a robin hopping on a branch, feeding, or preening its feathers does not need to justify itself. Those actions are already enough. And when I watch them, I feel happy simply because they are there. It is a kind of unconditional appreciation; I don’t need the bird to be rare or spectacular for it to matter.

Once, while recording data and updating QField, I noticed a Song Thrush standing right beside me, watching me. It was a quiet moment of seeing and being seen. I realized that it’s not only humans who observe birds, birds observe us too. I wondered what I might look like from its perspective.

That kind of simple, unfiltered joy helped me step away from anxiety.

Seeing St Andrews again, for the first time

By the time I reached my final year, I thought I already knew St Andrews. I knew the streets, the shortcuts, the best places to eat, the routes to class.

But I didn’t know this version of it. I didn’t know we had badgers here. I thought bats were something tropical. I didn’t know there were dolphins nearby. The coastline, too, feels more alive once you start paying attention.

Before, St Andrews was just a place I lived in. Now, it feels layered.

There are birds I recognize.

Habitats I understand.

Patterns I notice.

It’s strange to discover something new about a place just before leaving it. But maybe that’s also the right time.