Habituation

Most animals and people in fact learn via habituation or perhaps more accurately are trained by habituation. Scientifically habituation is the diminishing of an innate response to a frequently repeated stimulus. Think of it a little like the saying 'familiarity breeds contempt' or rather in this case familiarity makes the response more comfortable. In human psychology habituation is fundamental to cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), something I am accustomed, habituated to you might say. When tackling my anxiety over travel my CBT had me taking weekly train journeys in incrementally larger distances until travel by train was normal.

 Habituation has been used throughout human history to domesticate animals and it is something I have used send times over the years in my wildlife watching. When I first started regular patchwork back in 2001 my local swans were ZNY and VGY, over the space of many years I got to know this pair very well, and importantly they me. I saw them every week and each week I would have some bread or seed to feed them. Out of habit, I would make a whistle when I fed them and they soon associated that sound with me and food, pretty soon I did not need to whistle and they would come over as soon as they saw me. 

The habituation slowly developed into something more than cold psychology, we gained mutual trust and respect. In the end, before ZNY died and VGY moved off with a new mate, they were comfortable enough with me to allow me to sit alongside them and would even bring their cygnets over to within arms reach and be quite relaxed. I learned how to read their moods and behaviours and likewise, they learned my hand signals that denoted a warning for when I would move or stand or my splayed-out fingers to demonstrate I either had no food. This was a very special bond that I have never managed to replicate with the other swans in the area. 

I talk about habituation today because I think that the roe deer are beginning to habituate to me. The two young does have been on my patch their entire lives and just as the local foxes, badgers, and muntjacs are a normal sight, so I believe I have become to them. I am getting pretty good at guessing where on my patch they will be on any given day, nevertheless, they are always one step ahead of me. Their senses are keen and their camouflage nearly perfect.

 This week on my survey I decided not to be too stealthy, they knew I would be there long before I saw them and I wondered if acting stealthy might make me seem more predatory. I have found this trick useful in the past. I try to appear docile and part of the wildlife, I make my movements hesitant and wary I don't make eye contact, something that instantly screams predator. I even try to respond to alarm calls. If a blackbird or great tit alarms I will freeze and look and scared. I try everything I can to seem like one of them. This worked quite well. I spotted the roe deer lurking in the undergrowth they loped away but I didn't follow. Instead, I sat for a bit and then went on. When next I saw them they were standing in the undergrowth watching me, I avoided eye contact and moved further away. Keeping my moments slow I took a few photos. As they moved off again I followed slowly keeping a distance and again taking a seat on a gate feigning disinterest in them. They quickly settled down and whilst they were still wary of me their body language was more relaxed and as they moved they did so in a less panicked state. Although they weren't comfortable enough to stay in my presence they left at a slow pace and not due to any action of mine.

This was the most natural connection I have had with a roe deer and it stemmed from them becoming used to me - habituated and me becoming used to them - habituated. The danger of habituation is that they become too familiar with people, its why many rescue centres try to handle animals as little as possible and will use release pens.

The application of Apps in Wildlife Watching

 I am of the generation that saw the common use of mobile phones during my late teens. Back then they were simple brick-like affairs with just call and test functions, far removed from the pocket computers we have today. I am by no means a Luddite I am drafting this blog on a Remarkable (TM) tablet but wildlife watching has always been a getaway from technology. I use tech of course, what birder doesn't? , my binoculars, my camera, my Garmin GPS device for plotting trees, and my digital thermometer/anemometer but I had always avoided the application of apps.

This month however I have discovered two apps that I have found easy to work into my survey routine. 

First off is the Mammal Mapper by the Mammal Society. I must admit I have been using this app for a little while to log mammal sightings but I haven't been using it to its full potential. My increased use of the app came from my desire to submit more of my sightings to the Mammal Society national database. In the past, I had used its individual sighting mode which is simple to use and very intuitive. This month I have used it in survey mode and it was amazing.  

I used it on my own patch of course, where else would I test it? The app allows you to continuously track your movements on a map as you walk about. Whenever you spot a mammal you log a sighting by pressing the record button. The record button allows you to add photographs and record notes. You can also record mammals based on their tracks and signs and dead individuals. At the end of your walk, you press submit and this generates a map of where you walked highlighting each sighting. It also states the time taken and the distance traveled. 

The app is so easy to use and creates a great record of all your mammal sightings and the distance and length of your visits. Its greatest benefit is the fact that the information is logged directly with the Mammal Society. Of course, there is an inherent bias in this system, small rodents are likely to be under-reported, and most species are nocturnal and hard to spot but the facility to record mammal signs and record individual sightings makes this a powerful tool for the society to monitor mammal populations.

The second app I have started to use is the Merlin Bird App from Cornell University. I am normally a traditional birder and make field notes of birds whose identities I am unsure of rather than carry a bird book with me. I always do my checks at home late with my good bird books. I used to carry a book as a teenager but I was once told that a good birder never takes one with him, an element of birding snobbery that has stuck with me. So was not the visual ID tools that I was most interested in. 

The power of this app is instead its bird song and call identification. I am not the greatest at identifying birds from their song, I have learned the basics and I know most of the birds on my patch but I am still getting the hang of some, the warbler for instance. I have tried to improve and used  CD's and cassettes in the past but it never really stuck, for me, I think I need to associate the sound with actually seeing the bird a kind of visual tag to attach to the audio. 

Merlin isn't the only app out there for this I have used a few other apps before this one and find most to be lacking in one key area, accurate identification. The Merlin App bowled me over the first time I used it on my iPhone. Cornell is an American university and so I had to download the Britain and Ireland datasets but this was very easy and took up very little space, my other option was to download the birds of the Western Palearctic, but as I don't travel I think the local set will work fine. 

I have only used the bird song function and it is great. You click on the record button and the app will display a sonogram in real-time very much like some bat detectors. Beneath the sonogram, it will generate its estimation of the species and create a list of all being heard and highlights each one as they call.

 I have used it for several hours and not once did it misidentify a bird, an accuracy rate second to none. It helped me locate species on the survey I had missed. At one point a background call, which I would normally have ignored as too obscure, revealed itself to be a Goldcrest, honing in on the sound I was able to see it and confirm its presence.  

This isn't an app that I will use on every visit nor will I record a full survey, although this is eminently possible, all be it risking using up all my memory storage. I will use it to help train myself and on unknown or suspect birds. It will help tighten me up on my neverending battle to accurately identify Marsh Tits and all Willow Tits and will give me a better handle on Willow Warblers in the summer. 

Like all good apps these are tools to help, not take over your visits. It would be able to record a whole visit and not look up and around at all and still have a fairly good species list at the end, all be it lacking in the less vocal residents. 

Technology should augment our enjoyment and not steal the fun from it and these two apps certainly do that. On my Mammal Mapper survey, I was hyper-focused on mammal signs checking every footprint and examing every burrow whilst the Merlin app opened up the world of sound to me and encouraged me to be a better birder.

Displaced Nesting

 This week, heavy rain has resulted in a good deal of flooding, this time I did not lose any of my cameras to the rising floodwater. One effect of the raging torrent was that the efforts of the Swans to nest on the sandbank in the middle of the mill pond came to nothing.

Last years successful nest on the sandbank

 The old experienced pair VGY and ZNY used to nest in a secluded part of the river bank, since their demise and the inheritance of their territory by young swans they have each year attempted to nest on the sandbank. On the face of it, this sounds like good sense. Swan clutches can be as high as 7 or 8 individuals with the norm around here being 6, however, mortality is high with up to 50% of cygnets lost in the first few weeks. The island protects from the predation of Foxes which are common down the mill. The flaw is the water level. Flooding is a regular occurrence and often occurs during April when the nest is in full use and results in the nest being washed away eggs and all. Since 2006 when ZNY and VGY left Swans have nested on the site 9 times of which 6 times the nest was washed away and only 1 was successful.

The drive to make a nest is innate, it is hardwired into swans and you will often observe individuals start dragging out reeds and twigs to build a nest. Sometimes the urge is so strong that they will start to build in the most unfeasible sites. I have observed swans build a couple of nests abandoning each before deciding on another.

Over the last week, the pair of swans that are now resident on the site have been beginning to pull together a nest on the sandbank. Their progress was washed away on Friday in the rising waters. Today I watched the pair swim up into the backwater where the water was calmer. Here whilst the male fed the female couldn't help but try and build a nest.

What she was experiencing was displaced behaviour. In this case, although the location was unsuitable, it wasn't even on solid ground the urge to build was so strong that she was trying. More sadly I have seen the same occur late in the season by lone Swans, swans who have failed to find a mate or lost them prior to mating still building a nest, an exercise in futility courtesy of the hard-wired biological imperative to reproduce.