Phase I:
Behavioral Observations

Overview

Individual Work

Goal 1: Identify potential behaviors for ethography

Goal 2: Consider timing options for ethography

Components: Field Observations (1-2 hrs)
Reflection (10-20 min)

Assignment: Canvas Q’s & photo upload

Team Discussion (1-1.5 hr)

Goal: Decide on behaviors and timing for ethography

Assignment: Canvas questions

Individual Work

Before you begin, read the pages linked on the Optimal Foraging main page carefully, especially the Quantifying Behavior page.

You will need:

• A feeding station: peanuts, popcorn, or sunflower seeds piled on a tray, plate, or shallow bowl. You want enough to last for a while and to attract some animals, so at least a cup or two.

• Binoculars

• Your field book

• (optional) a coat, blanket, or camp chair to sit on.
  

1. 1. Identify a site where you can safely watch common critters (e.g. squirrels) with minimal interruption. This could be your backyard or a quiet spot on campus. The exact location is up to you.
      

   2. Find a place at least 20 ft away from the feeding station where you can quietly observe for 20-30 min. Get comfortable.
      

   3. Begin an entry in your field book with the following details:

      • Date

      • Time

      • Location

      • Type of food & amount given

      • How food was offered

      • Where you are relative to the food

      • Any other relevant info about the surroundings -- i.e. “food is ~10 ft from large maple tree and ~15 ft from a flower bed”. (Try to think about what aspects of the environment might matter to small animals.)

   4. Using the binoculars, observe any animals that approach the feeding station. For each visitor, record:

      • What it is, to the best of your ability (you might not know the species, but use descriptive language (i.e. ‘gray squirrel’, ‘striped chipmunk’, ‘bird with red breast’, ‘crow’, ‘small spotted brown bird’).

      • How long it stays

      • Whether and how much it eats.

      • If it interacts with any other animals (if so, which? And what is the interaction like?)

      • Any behaviors that strike you.

        • If you’re drawing a blank, ask yourself “what is it doing, and how is it doing it?”

        • Remember: small things like sitting in a particular posture, freezing, or sniffing the air are all good behaviors.
          

   5. If no animals come within 20 min, you have a choice. You could either go away, leaving the food in place, and come back an hour to try again. Or you could immediately try again in another location.
      

   6. When you’ve at least watched three different individual animals for at least 10 min each, you’re done (that could be 3 squirrels, 2 squirrels and 1 bird, 3 different species … any combo is fine). If you’re not getting much action, see step 5.
      

   7. Before cleaning up the feeding station, note how much food was taken.
      

Individual Sharing & Assignment

• use your phone to scan your field notes, and upload the resulting pdf to your team's shared drive

• answer questions on Canvas (Pilot Check-in: Individual Assignment)

Team Meeting

Arrange a time to meet face-to-face as team. Your choice whether that’s in person, Zoom, Google Meet, conference call, or something else -- but IT CANNOT BE A TEXT CHAIN OR GROUP CHAT! You must actually be able to speak to each other!

At your meeting, you should accomplish the following things. You'll be uploading your notes and answering a few questions in the Pilot Check-in: Team Assignment in Canvas

Sharing Observations

1. Choose one person to take notes.

2. Each team member should describe the animals they observed.

   • Are there any animals that everyone saw?

   • Are there any animals that only one person found?
     

3. Did anyone have trouble finding animals at all? Were they able to resolve their problem? If not, what step needs to be taken next (maybe bring it up in your meeting with me?)

Decision Making

As a team, you have four decisions to make for the pilot experiment:

1. What food items to compare?
   
   The question driving the pilot is Does ______ [animal] prefer foods with lower handling time? All else being equal, optimal foraging predicts that animals should favor foods that can be eaten most quickly. One easy way to manipulate handling time is using shelled vs unshelled nuts. The nuts themselves are nutritionally equivalent, so the only difference is the time it takes to remove the shell.
   I recommend that you choose a nut -- peanuts work well, but so would any tree nut -- to compare shelled versus unshelled options. If anyone on your team has a nut allergy, you can do the same with shelled vs unshelled sunflower seeds, or popped vs unpopped popcorn.
   
   You should also decide what quantity to use (e.g. 40 peanuts). Bear in mind that availability can also influence foraging decisions, so the shelled and unshelled treatments need to have comparable availability. Volume metrics might be problematic, since 1 cup of shelled peanuts is very different, nutritionally, from 1 cup of unshelled peanuts.. Numbers, e.g. "40 peanuts", would be easier to control between treatments.

2. What species to focus on?
   
   I recommend that the team choose a single species that everyone can observe. Gray squirrels; chipmunks; crows … any of these would be excellent. By all observing the same species, each student can collect a few replicates for the team to pool together. If you each get ethograms for 3 different individuals you’ll have 12 replicates as a team, which is a great sample size for your stats. (If you’re interested in multiple species, I recommend saving that interest for the main experiment.)
   

3. What behaviors to include in the ethogram?
   Go around in a circle:

   1. Each team member should share one specific behavior that they identified for this species.

   2. Continue going around until everyone has shared all potential behaviors.

   3. As a team, settle on 5-10 behaviors to use in your ethograms.
      

4. What time interval and duration to use for the ethogram?
   As a team, decide

   1. How long the total observation period should be

   2. How long each time interval should be.

   3. How many nuts to use at each feeding station.
      

5. Using a shared Google Doc, create a blank ethogram (similar to that shown below) that each team member can print out during Phase II.
   You’ll need a column for each behavior, and enough rows to complete the observation period -- e.g. if you’re using 30 second intervals for 20 min, you’ll need 40 rows total.

Team Sharing & Assignment

1. Upload your discussion notes to Canvas (if notes were handwritten, upload a photo)

2. Answer the Team Assignment questions in Canvas

3. Schedule your team meeting with me

4. Every student should write the decisions made at the meeting down in their field book. Take a photo of your personal notes and upload it to Canvas.