HON 120

Observations of Captive Animals

Tote-em-in Zoo

Purpose of Field Trip: To practice observations, generate a research question, and quantify observations.

1. With a partner, choose a species to observe. Spend about 15 minutes making ad lib. field notes, describing different behavior patterns that you see. These can be social or nonsocial behavior patterns. Try to define the behavior patterns in terms of EMPIRICAL definitions.

2. Identify several descriptive questions that you want to ask about the animal’s behavior. Can be related to social interactions, use of the environment, sequences of behavior patterns. Identify the behavior patterns that you will observe and decide which of these data collection techniques will be most useful (ie, frequency or duration measures). Try to keep it pretty simple.

3. You should practice at least 2 or 3 of the techniques during your observations (eg, one-zero; scans; frequency data collection; duration data collection; continuous recording; focal observation. You can fashion your data collection pages (just use your field notebook) after the examples we used in class. With your partner, you can practice different types of data collection and check for inter-observer reliability.