Fieldnotes January 12, 2009
Comments(2) The Aggie “Rapid Behavioral Assessment Team” descended on Fossil Rim for a week, starting today. After settling into Wolf Ridge cabins last night, we enjoyed hobo stew, a cold clear moonlit night and getting to know each other.
Our agenda for today was to set goals for the week, which are at the interface between what Kelley & Adam want to learn for the “Big Herd Scenario” and our goals for practicing skills for scientific inquiry applied to behavior. That boiled down to “what are the questions we can answer in this week, that Kelley would find useful for management decisions and communicating the Big Herd Scenario to other members of the consortium”. We also wanted to do reconnaisance observations on the site and waterbuck herd.
This morning we set up our headquarters in the small conference room and were introduced to Fossil Rim staff in education and animal care. Kelley talked with us for about an hour, covering the big picture of the Big Herd Scenario for managing species at risk of extinction. We briefly touched on the idea of how what we will be doing during this week will be setting a precedent for how other teams in the future could perform rapid behavioral assessments as needed on other species (e.g. at risk addax, addra and p-horse) at the three other institutions collaborating in the consortium (The Wilds, Front Royale, White Oak Plantation).
We hopped in the van to do reconnaisance observations. As we drove through the front pasture, the kudu pasture, the main pasture and the game (overlook) pasture, we identified each of the species and talked about their behavioral ecology. This helped us to apply an evolutionary perspective to understanding the similarities and differences among species. We chilled out over lunch at the overlook, then continued through the game pasture, got slimed by the giraffes, ambushed by the aoudads and admired the lazy cheetahs.
At 3:00, we started observations on the waterbuck herd. We used the ad libitum observation technique, focusing on the group. We each recorded observations by hand in our pocket notebooks, and compared perspectives afterwards. We made a list of the advantages and disadvantages of the ad libitum technique.
Back at the admin building, in the evening we wrote up notes, enjoyed spaghetti supper and reviewed our accomplishments for the day. We got the computer systems partially set up, tried to solve problems with access to this blog (VPN patch from cis.tamu.edu), and planned for tomorrow.
To add comments to this post, the am team “TIM” and the pm team “JAM” brainstormed separately and will elaborate more on our findings today.
I felt it was a really successful day. Our team is jelling we are working through hurdles and really enjoying being outdoors. I feel very grateful to Fossil Rim staff for helping make this all possible!.
–Jane