"1, 2, 3, testing, testing"

Just to get it over with, I study "The role of personality in the social networks of Great Tits". Great Tits, in this case, are birds! Also known as 'koolmees'. We are going to use a new radiotrack system in which we do not have to run with a Yagi-antenna after the birds like crazy people. No, we have 'base stations' that will be spread around in the forest and will log all the information of tags coming near them. At the end of the day we will visit all the base stations and collect the information. Birds with a known 'exploration' score will be fitted with a radio tag and so we hope that we will be able to relate 'personality' (exploration can be used as proxy for personality, there are tons of papers about it, read them) with spacial use.
Sound good right? But as we use a new system 'Encounternet', it will have to be tested first. Formula's for location estimates have to be developed and location estimates can be influences by several things: density of base stations, objects obstructing the signals (aka trees), distance to the base node, etc. So we (me and my three MSc students) started out with a trial on campus, just to entertain the working people, not because the Prof was sick and we had a shortage in cars to get to the forest. Everything we do in science is because we planned it that way! Never forget that.
Under the watchful eye of a little Robin, we set out the base stations and GPS mapped them. We checked the check-list twice, so we have everything. Or maybe not. Apperantly we need tags for this test.. To make them look like birds we mounted them on wooden sticks (don't ask). Everything seemed to go well, until we noticed that the Campus Gardening departement decided they wanted to trim the trees on our test field. And they needed a tractor to do this. For a little backgrount info: our base stations are not very visible. We noticed that during the trial when we walked passed them a significant number of times (some aspects of the trial still need to be improved). So when I saw the tractor making its way to base station number 307 a lot of things went through my mind (that I will not discuss in public), but I do not think I have run that fast a lot of times in my life.
We managed to save everything in tact and ended up having a nice talk with the gardners about what the hell we were doing, why and most importantly: what is the use? It is always fun to explain why scientists do what they do and how that could be of any relevance. Not sure if I made a very convincing speech about why we should be very interested in the social networks of Great Tits, besides the fact that it is just really really interesting!, but they seemed satisfied with my answer (or they just let the crazy people be).
Next week I am going to visit my first official conference as PhD student in Lunteren (you have to start small). The rest of the week will be about meeting people, discussing papers, trying to get GPX data into XML format and doing a trial in the forest (Its always good to plan things without assuming we will freeze to death). So much excitement again to come!

PS I have not figured out yet how to do the English spelling check.