See you at the movies

Hello again, it’s been a while. So the field season is over now. Already? Yes. It only took 3 months. 3 months of getting up at 4:00 AM in the morning, biking rounds in the freezing cold, making days of 15 hours and getting bitten by about 35 birds flees. However, also 3 months of ringing little great tit chicks, having a red fox almost stumbling over your feet, little lambs dancing all around and the most beautiful sunlight falling through the forest canopy at 6:00 AM in the morning. At the moment we are making a movie clip of all of this. Not to try to let people experience those frustrations and magic moments of the field work, because if you never have been out there,  it is not really possible..

No, we are making a little clip to show people what we were up to all those months in the forest, putting those weird base nodes (you should know what they are by now!) and song recorders in trees (“Do the birds all get their own Ipod now?”). But also to share our findings, letting everyone see that what’s happening in “the forest” is not so different from what is happening on your pc right now.

Great tits live together in populations. They are connected physically, by encountering each other, as well as vocally, by singing. In this sense they are not so different from us, we both live in social networks and no one of us is alike.

So, take our best known social network: Facebook

You can:	Birds can share:	We study:
-share status	“I am the best great tit ever!” “I am much more reliable!”	Fitness consequences of personality
-share locations	“I am near my nest-box right now”	Spatial behaviour
-share songs	“teacher, teacher, teacher”	Song
-befriend/unfriend	“If you sing in my territory once more..”	Social Networks

So we are trying to put all this in a 3 a 4 minute movie-clip. Yes we are. It’s quite interesting acting to be yourself and it’s amazing to find out how many hours go in a minute, apparently.. And although it will never come close to having that red fox stumble on your feet, we hope to amaze you never the less..