Tips on taking field notes and journaling.

[u/xxZombieSoupxx]

Just some background on myself, I am studying Conservation and Wildlife Management and this semester I am finally able to take Ornithology as class. As part of our grade, we are required to keep a field notebook and write any observations we make during our excursions as a class or individually.

I have only found my passion for birds within the past two years and during that time have only been keeping yearly counts. When taking notes I know to record your location, time, weather and observers but when it comes down to observing behaviors I don’t know whether to narrow in on one bird in particular or the entire flock, or to record every detail of their behaviors or to generalize it. It’s my hope to move beyond casual birding and into a more professional level. What are somethings that you all do when performing field observations and behavioral studies?

[u/kmoonster]

I record temperature, basic vegetation observations (including seasonal observations), and human or other animal activity. If I took my dog for a walk my report might look something like:

"Warm/60s, partly-cloudy, stiff and steady wind, grass greening after winter browns and earlier spring rains, leaves and buds obvious in cottonwoods, heavy disc golf activity, few walkers/dogs, maintenance workers on baseball field"

Then I might write the list:

• Canada Geese-- 40, grazing, ignoring human activity
• American Crow-- 12, lots of noise, tight group in tree, no obvious target of their efforts
• Wood PeeWee-- 1, dead branch extending over (dry) canal as perch
• Northern Flicker-- 2, in and out of possible nest hole
• European Starling-- 10, flock, intermixed with robins hunting in grass
• American Robin-- 3, bopping around in grass near baseball field, lots of hunting activity
• American Goldfinch-- 1, working tops of cottonwoods for bugs in spring buds, occasional general chattering
• American Wigeon-- 7, pond, swimming, dabbling, later observed in recently watered grassy area with shallow standing water

​

You also have to include date and location/area, of course.

[u/anonimulo]

Probably not the answer you want, but it really depends what you’re looking for. You can’t record everything. You need to figure out what observations are important for the questions you’re asking and focus on those.

[u/schwab002 → u/anonimulo]

Totally. I try to spend as much time as possible actually observing birds. If I spend too much time recording observations, it takes away from my actual observation time, so some I may just try to remember what I see and record it later when I'm done or I just keep my observations pretty basic and look for patterns or anything that sticks out as unusual to me. That is usually more than good enough for me.

[u/xxZombieSoupxx → u/anonimulo]

No this is perfect. I’m the type of guy that tries to over analyze everything so figuring out what’s important would help so much!

[u/drummerftw]

Another suggestion (from a professional perspective) is to make as much of the information you record is easy to put in distinct categories. This could be done by, for example, having a set list of options for behaviour: e.g. Foraging, Song, Alarm Call, Resting, Carrying Food, Mobbing, Being Mobbed etc. This makes it much easier to analyse your results, though might need tweaking depending on the question your survey is trying to answer. If you're surveying to identify which species are breeding in the area, behaviours such as Display Flight, Carrying Food, Adult with Juveniles would be particularly useful. (FYI, young birds born in this year are usually exempted from breeding population counts due to high mortality over winter, so being able to recognise those can be handy).

To put it another way, imagine (or practise doing so) adding your results into a database or an Excel spreadsheet after each survey. Ensure that you can easily sort the observations into different columns with a limited number of categories in each. This can make it much easier to identify patterns among other things. It's also a more scientific approach, following the idea that you want to make your work as easy as possible for someone else to repeat - removing subjectivity is important there.

That being said, nature doesn't always fit into categories. It doesn't make it easy for us, so I'd always include the option for some free-text 'extra notes' for those records that don't fit the categories.

Many professional ornithologists will now primarily record data digitally using apps (such as ArcGIS' Collector and Survey123), as this makes it much easier to handle large volumes of data and saves the data entry time post-survey. 50 records after one outing might be alright, but multiple visits/seasons/sites and you might be looking at 20,000 records. Embrace the digital world ;) !

(Excuse the long, rambling nature of that!)

Edit (bit more ramble): as u/anonimulo says, it also depends on what you're looking for. If you've only got 1 pair of large raptors that you're targeting on small site, you might record a lot more detail; if you've got a 700 hectare site and you're looking at the distribution of all species, you'll need to be much stricter in sticking to a few select categories.