Every morning for forty-one years, Halil sat by his kitchen window at six o'clock and wrote down the birds he could see. His neighbours found it eccentric. His daughter found it tedious. Nobody, including Halil, thought it was science. He used cheap notebooks and a pencil. Date, weather, species, number. Nothing else. When a notebook was full, he put it in a box under the stairs and started another one. He was not a naturalist. He had worked thirty years in a furniture factory and left school at fourteen. He simply liked the birds, and counting them gave the morning a shape. After he died, his daughter found forty-one notebooks. She almost threw them away. Instead, on an impulse she could not explain, she emailed a university. Two researchers drove four hours to see them. What Halil had produced, without intending to, was an unbroken local record of bird populations covering four decades. Such records are extraordinarily rare. Funded studies last three years, five if they are lucky, and then the money stops and the counting stops with it. His notebooks showed the sparrows declining from the mid-nineties. They showed a species arriving in 2011 that had never been recorded that far north. They showed, in a handwriting that grew shakier each year, exactly when the winters stopped being cold enough. The paper that came out of it lists him as a co-author. He would have found that ridiculous. His daughter keeps one notebook on her shelf. The rest are in an archive now, properly catalogued, in acid-free boxes, treated with the seriousness that he never once claimed for them.