The Number-Crunching Grind!

I have not published a lab note in a while largely because Elliot and Nathaniel are in the midst of number crunching (and becoming acquainted with the more tedious aspect of science) and frankly anything I would say would become horribly repetitious. So, today I will briefly go over what they are currently doing to hold everyone over until they start to make sense of the numbers.

 

Elliot doing time budgets on GoPro videos of the perch selection trials.

Currently Elliot is going through all the GoPro videos he collected during the perch-selection trials in Arizona to construct time budgets. These time budgets will then be used to see if the experimental birds intentionally selected the cool perch when temperatures were warm. In order to do this Elliot must slowly go through each video, which are either 30 or 60 minutes in length and categorize what the bird is doing during each second of the trial as well as where in the arena (warm or cooled side) the activity occurred. Elliot hopes to finish up this part of the analysis this week sometime.

 

Nathaniel measuring the duration of time hummingbirds were at feeders throughout the day.

Nathaniel recently completed tallying the number of hummingbirds in various perching locations for each 15-minute interval during the day, and is now going through all the photos taken by the PlotWatcher trail cameras at each of the feeder locations to measure the duration of feeder visits by hummingbirds during these same 15-minute intervals. This is a time-consuming task as the PlotWatchers took photos at 1-second intervals for the entire daylight period so there are thousands of photos from each day. The is made a little easier by running the photos through software (Merikat) which removes all photos without hummingbirds. Even so, Nathaniel must step through each photo and count the number of seconds each hummingbird remained at the feeder. In the end these data will tell us if temperature impacts the duration of feeder stays (i.e. how quickly must a hummingbird return to a cool microclimate).

 

PlotWatcher image of a male black-chinned hummingbird visiting a feeder.

Nathaniel and Elliot still have a long road to hoe, but when they are done should have an exciting story to tell.