Megan - Gang-gangs usually draw attention to themselves when they are commuting, or actively feeding. They are less conspicuous for the long periods they spend resting in trees, sometimes mutually preening, sometimes dozing, eyes wholly or partly closed, often giving a soft growling calling, itself quite noticeable when you know it. I suppose work has been done somewhere on their time ‘budget’(sorry) … [I have plucked the following at random. Counting that sort of thing seems to be a preoccupation of biologists these days.]
Measuring Behavior: Ethograms, Kinematic
Diagrams, and Time Budgets
by H. Jane Brockmann
Departument of Zoology
University of Florida
Time Budgets
: An ethogram gave us a list of the characteristic action patterns
of an animal and the kinematic diagram gives an excellent overview of behavioral
sequences and how frequently certain behaviors occur. However, neither really
tells us how much time an animal spends performing each behavior. Note that
even though a behavior is very common, it may be that the animal still spends
very little time at it because it is brief.
Time is an important commodity to all organisms, given that life is finite
and that opportunities are often fleeting. We will see later in the course that in
many activities animals carefully regulate their "expenditure" of time. Moreover,
in some cases, time can also be a good stand-in for energy -- especially if the
activity is steadily performed.
A time budget for an animal is just like one for a human -- it lists the
percentage of time that an animal spends doing various activities. These
"activities" may be either particular action patterns such as producing a territory
call or they could be more broadly defined activities such as territory
maintenance. The latter would include calling, patrolling and perhaps even
fighting.
Time budgets are obtained by:
• defining the behavioral units under consideration (somewhat and perhaps
totally akin to obtaining an ethogram)
• measuring the time spent on each of these
• totalling the time
• obtaining a fraction for each activity
From: Megan Mears [
Sent: Friday, 16 May 2014 5:41 PM
To:
Subject: [canberrabirds] Do Gang-gangs spend their whole lives eating?
Since I have been looking out for Gang-gangs, I'm not sure I have noticed them do much else. Occasional sitting and digesting I guess.
I'm interested in others' observations.
