An ethogram

Choose an active species. Try to be unobtrusive and quiet because your behavior may affect the birds' activities. Stay close enough to see all the activities but not so close that you disturb your subjects by your proximity or staring at them or by any noise you make. They may flee or become immobile, neither of which is helpful for your data collection. They may become habituated to your presence after some time and then behave in their normal fashion even though aware of your presence. Describe the birds. Field guides in the library will be helpful. Diagram the habitat. After your description of the birds, you need to familiarize yourself with the behavioral repertoire of your chosen species. Observing for an ethogram gives you the time and a framework in which to gain understanding of the animals by noting what they do and how they do it. To get started, watch the birds for an hour and take notes of their different activities. In your field notebook, note the date and time, conditions such as weather, crowd numbers, etc. and then keep track of the time and behavior you see. This is called AD LIB sampling, an informal note-taking procedure of as many behavior patterns as you see. You will be trying to describe at least a dozen. The behavior may be motoric (e.g., flying and climbing, or concerned with body maintenance [feeding and elimination, bathing and preening] or exploratory, such as searching or scanning, or social: affiliative (friendly) or agonistic (threatening), or other behavior. When are the birds most active? Consult two or three articles in scientific journals about the natural history of the species you have chosen. Then you are ready to begin your ethogram.
What is an ethogram? An ethogram is a catalogue of the different action patterns of your species such as those listed above. When you think you are familiar with many of the species behavior patterns that are repeated in their daily routine. start listing these patterns as you watch the animals. Try not to be subjective or label the patterns at the beginning. Use descriptive names. Pretend that you are describing your chosen species and its behavior to a Martian who has never seen the species. Write down careful descriptions of the movements so that others could read your descriptions and recognize those exact same movements. Exactly how was the movement done? Was there any sound? (EXAMPLE: Open beak thrust. One bird is opening its beak and thrusting it in the direction of another bird.) Is there any movement of the rest of the body toward the other bird? Any change in the eyes or in the plumage? Any sound? Any other movement that goes along with the open beak? The above behavior could be a begging movement by young or by a mate for food or it may be a threat display. What was the context of the behavior? Your label for a behavior does not describe the behavior. If you call a behavior a "threat behavior" that label does not tell us what the actions were; it tries to tell us something about the situation, it passes judgment on the action. One must exercise care in labeling behavior patterns. Sometimes the movements may belong also to a different pattern of behavior and then they may be done for different reasons. So, try to keep a human bias out of your observations in the beginning. Simply note that one bird is opening its beak at another and describe what happens. Later, you can label the behavior when you are more familiar with it and the context in which it is performed. Using your list of behavior patterns, you need to find out the frequency of those patterns in an hour's time. For this type of record, you will use FOCAL ANIMAL SAMPLING. You cannot record all activities of a group of animals at the same time, but you can get good behavior notes on one animal for a short period of time. Be sure you can identify the one subject —how does it differ from the rest? Choosing a time when the animals will most likely be active, simply note how the activity is done and when it changes. Again, write down date, time and conditions and then list behavior patterns and times. Abbreviations save time (feeding-FD), but provide a key to your abbreviations. Record activities until you have 3-4 hours of data so that you can calculate the time your subjects spend on the activities you have listed in their behavioral repertoire. Using your data, make an activity chart with percentages of time devoted to each activity. Add up the time spent on each behavior during the time you watched your subjects. Then divide the number of minutes spent in an activity by the total number of minutes spent in all the observations to get the percent of time spent on each activity. Make a Pie Chart of the percentages of time spent in various activities so that the observer can quickly understand the interrelationships of the behavior patterns and their relative frequency in the daily routine of the subject . The percentages on the Pie Chart should add up to 100%.Chart showing the proportion of