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Clearly it's someone with a white lab coat and a clip board. Extra scientist points are awarded if it's an attractive female in a white lab coat, hair up in a slightly messy bun, black rimmed glasses and she is chewing on the end of her pencil as she ponders the BF mystery.....

Old Dog, I disagree with your characterization that they are no more sensitive than sheep, goat, hogs, etc. They have superior eidetic and echoic long-term memory for very brief presentations sometimes experienced only one time. This puts them into a differing category of animal. They have an audiographic memory very much like the lyrebird and it persists over a long period of time. Stan Courtney has even encountered them mimicking weedeaters for example. Unlike the lyrebird they don't seem to have any limitations on the range and numbers of sounds they can recall. They can easily fool the originator of the sound they are recalling/imitating. Don't ask me how I know, because it has been a long haul to get there.

Key to understanding my post is sound interaction leading to communication. Not like they are doing quantum physics or anything but assuming you believe you have a captive audience it is one way of establishing contact without beating baseball bats on trees in the middle of the night. A lot of this work was done in daylight. I used various techniques including mixed up bird medleys, mockingbird on lsd varieties. I also used asymmetric hollow sounding percussive tones (some played one time). These tended to be remembered and improv'd upon and repeated back near me at 3 am some months later. It is what they call an aha experience. My premise is challenge them to some mental gymnastics and leave the mini-bats for T-ball teams.

A science degree doth not an expert make. That degree is based on the knowledge and expertise of others that was passed down to a student. As JDL stated, laymen who study subjects in the natural field in a scientific manner can, by definition, qualify as being a scientists; even experts in specific fields.

Technically, a scientist is anyone who applies the scientific method when investigating a hypothesis. There were scientists long before there were scientific organizations, degrees, and scientific awards. Is an amateur astronomer who discovers an asteroid barreling toward Earth any less an astronomer than someone with a PhD in the science? The amateur is probably using a better telescope than Galileo had. On the other hand, is Bill Nye, the "Science Guy", really a climate scientist? After all, he only has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. The real question is: "What does society currently accept as reasonable qualifications for a "Scientist"? And the answer may vary from field to field, subject to subject, and political viewpoint to political viewpoint. Unfortunately; advanced degrees, experience, and resources are accompanied by a healthy portion of hubris.