The Greater Racket-tailed Drongo: My First Birding Experience
By T asnim Mohd Hanafiah Growing up in the suburbs of Malaysia where nature was often just an afterthought, birds to me used to be just…birds (or ‘burung’ as they are called in Malay)—a common and forgettable member of the scenery. If you asked me the bird types I knew back then, I would have said ‘chickens, pigeons, crows’ and maybe Common Mynas and Eurasian Tree Sparrows if I bothered to look up their actual species. Common Myna (left) and Eurasian Tree Sparrows (right) are common birds you can find throughout Malaysia. Pictures from Pixabay. Images are free for commercial use and no attribution is required. It was not until two years ago when I truly appreciated their diversity. I had an amazing opportunity to volunteer for the Langur Project Penang, a citizen science project founded by Joleen Yap, a PhD student at Universiti Sains Malaysia. The project was focused on studying an endemic langur species on Penang Island, otherwise known as the du...