Time to do some actual work

So today I went out on my own to start to get some actual data. I woke up pretty early, had just some fruit for breakfast and drove to Londru Plain in the Western sector. Happily I found a hybrid after not too long of drive and parked myself to start observing him. Dr. Rubenstein sent me an undergrad thesis a former student had done on these hybrids a few years ago, so for now I am just trying to follow her methods. Rosemary didn't really show me any techniques, and Dan just briefly mentioned what he might want me to do, so I am kind of winging it.

I am focusing on time-budgets for now, which is where you watch a focal animal for a specific length of time (say 30 min or an hour) and record what behaviors it is doing continuously. So every time it switches from grazing to walking or vigilant to self-grooming, etc., you have to note the behavior and the time. Each new activity ends the previous one and at the end of the sample you calculate how long the animal spent on each activity. The problem is, when they are switching actions sometimes evey 4 or 5 seconds, it is really hard for one person to watch through binoculars, check the time, write it down, and find the animal again before it has moved on to the next activity. Plus I am also trying to take photos during all of this for identification of the hybrid and to document their place in the herd and things like that. It would be much easier if I could just call out the behaviors and have someone else write them and the times down. Blair uses either a voice recorder (and then transcribes everything later) or a computer program that logs the activities and times for you. The computer would be great, but it is hard to take out in the field with you. With the voice recorder you can be more accurate than writing things down as they happen, but the transcribing takes awhile apparently. I don't have the computer program or a voice recorder... what I really need is an assistant. But that is not going to happen this time around... so I might need to ask Dan if there is an alternate way to sample.

After I watched to first hybrid male for about an hour and half, he joined a herd where I noticed a second hybrid, a female, so I switched to watching her and did another time-budget focal sample. After that I came back for lunch and to enter the data into my computer before I forgot things or couldn't read my own handwriting anymore and got confused. I tried to go back out in the afternoon to the soutern sector, but there were hardly any animals out there today. There were a ton of baboons on the airstrip, but I only found a few zebra on Scott's Plain, and no hybrids. So now Robin and I are just catching up on the internet before dinner.