I could title this page “Why I got security called on me so often”.
Yes, that actually happened.
When most people encounter me in data-collection mode, I’m usually wearing a lot of gear. At any given time, I might be wearing or using binoculars, clipboards, video cameras, loudspeakers, and/or a parabolic microphone. My attention is usually directed at the crows in the area, but most bystanders don’t notice the crows. They notice me, searching the area for who-knows-what.
I’m also usually wearing something to make myself unrecognizable. One of my earlier studies involved measuring how crows react to the various things that I did (such as feeding them). However, crows can remember human faces; I didn’t want the crows to change their behavior because they recognize me when I revisit the area.
My original intention was to use some latex masks that my lab had created for the facial recognition study. We know that they fool crows. Unfortunately, people find them terrifying.
Since I really wanted people to stop calling the cops on me (getting arrested would mess up my experiment), I had to think of a more benign way to disguise myself. The solution I settled on was to play dress up. I came up with a number of disguises. So if you saw me in the field between 2015-2016, I was probably wearing one of the following:
Starting from the top and moving from left to right, I called these disguises 1) The birder, 2) The sick guy, 3) The jogger, 4) The geezer, 5) The allergic guy, and 6) The worker. I know most of these look ridiculous, but they still hide my face well enough to stop the crows from remembering me, and they’re a lot less disturbing than those latex masks.