There is a liminal space in science that rarely makes it into journals.
It is not the space of results, nor of methods, nor of conclusions. It exists before hypotheses harden and long before data are organised into figures. It is the space where observation lingers a little longer than usual, where patterns feel familiar but remain unnamed, and where questions are allowed to exist without the obligation to answer them.
This space has always mattered.
Much of ornithology, like all sciences, advances through structure: protocols, peer review, replication, and careful language. These are not constraints but safeguards. Without them, knowledge would dissolve into speculation. Yet before any of this structure exists, someone must notice something that does not quite fit — not as an error, but as an invitation.
One can easily imagine Charles Darwin in such a moment: not writing On the Origin of Species, but sitting with uncertainty long before the argument took form. The theory came later. First came attention.
Over time, The Ornithologist has focused primarily on what ornithology does best: translating research, examining evidence, and placing new findings into ecological and evolutionary context. That remains its core. But alongside this, there is another layer of engagement with birds that many field-oriented observers will recognise — the accumulation of long-term impressions, recurring anomalies, and behavioural nuances that are noticed repeatedly yet rarely articulated.
These observations do not arrive as hypotheses. They arrive as unease, curiosity, or persistent attention.
For this reason, The Ornithologist is introducing a new editorial feature dedicated to scientific thinking before formalisation. This is not a research section, nor a platform for alternative theories. It is a clearly framed space for reflective pieces that sit upstream of hypothesis testing — where ideas are acknowledged as provisional, incomplete, and deliberately open-ended.
I am a firm believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation. — Charles Robert Darwin
This editorial series is not an attempt to bypass science, nor to dilute it. It is an attempt to recognise that curiosity itself has a legitimate place, provided it is named honestly for what it is. The contributions published under this feature will not argue for acceptance, nor seek validation. They will simply document moments where attentive field experience and conceptual wondering intersect.
Such thinking has always existed in ornithology; it has simply been informal, private, or shared only in conversation. Bringing it into print does not elevate it to theory — it situates it transparently, so readers can decide how, or whether, it resonates with their own experience.
Importantly, this is not a rejection of expertise. It is an invitation to dialogue between observation and explanation, between lived familiarity with birds and the frameworks we use to understand them. Many of the discipline’s most valuable questions began in precisely this unguarded space.
If ornithology is to continue growing — not just in data volume but in conceptual depth — it must occasionally allow itself to sit still. To look outward without rushing to explain. To let questions breathe before they are asked formally.
This series exists to mark that pause.
Not a manifesto.
Not a defence.
Just a place to think — before the thinking becomes something
Coming Soon!