"It was the summer of 2013"

After a couple weeks of preparation I was ready to begin my research. I had zoos, centers and wildlife parks all lined up and ready to visit. I feel I must put some form of disclaimer here though, I will not  criticize or bad mouth places just because I'm behind a keyboard. I see that as unprofessional, unfair and rude. I have a lot of thanks to offer the institutions who have allowed me to carry out research and all I hope is that I can present them with a study that is worthy of their time. Failure is not an option for me with this dissertation, I will not disappoint myself. I need to prove something to myself, make all this hard work pay off.

First of all was Cotswold Falconry center. This is the very center I volunteer at. I got lucky with the weather, it was scorching hot all 3 days, standing outside with a camera and pen & paper without sun cream was not ideal & by the Friday my tomato-esque face seemed to agree with that sentiment. I settled into the routine quite quickly, looking for what I needed and recording it, I even had my camera to back me up to help me concentrate on 1 bird at a time. Not much else to tell really, I picked up on some nice little behaviours including evidence of courtship, particularly interesting with this pair as they are young and not yet mature. Not much else to say really. That seems to be the only problem when things run smoothly, the word count dramatically decreases!

Week 2 began on an equally positive note. It was time to go to Cotswold Wildlife Park. Once more everything went equally as well and to plan, went there got my data, re watched my film footage & collected more data. I love it when a plan comes together. However, Friday was a different story, woke up at 7am and BAM! rain, rain and more forsaken rain! I hadn't seem that much water since our dreary wet spring. Safe to say I thought the day was gone, but I was mistaken, I managed to time my visit to the wildlife park to perfection, I got the 3 hour window I needed and as soon as I returned home it rained once more. Now this pair of birds are possibly my favourite out of those I have observed so far. They are an old pair of birds, if my memory serves me right they arrived at the wildlife park in 1980, this makes them pretty old on the raptor age scale, and also makes them one of the founder pairs for a lot of the striated caracara around the UK. Pretty awesome!

Then like a flash the 3rd week of August was upon me. This week I traveled through the Cotswold's once more (I really do love that place) to Birdland Park & Gardens. It was really good to be back at Birdland, I did a weeks work experience there 3 years ago & hadn't really had the opportunity to go back there since, oh how everything changes with a driving license. Once there I set up & got to work like I had the other 2 weeks. It was good to have a chat with some of the keepers again as well. Yet again with all the previous weeks everything had gone to plan, so finding anything to write is quite difficult. 

Week 4 however is where it started getting even more interesting. I had been driving for under a month & now I had to try and travel to Reading for 3 days to visit Beale Park, 120 miles a day... Yay. The sarcasm was ever present on the first day, that been said though, it was actually a pleasant drive, plenty of red kites about and some gorgeous scenery. I am glad that I subconsciously booked my week to go the week after Reading festival, that would have been hell, on the other hand, I wasn't clever enough realise that the week after there was a race day at Silverstone, plenty of 3 hour traffic jams... The highlight of the week though was probably nearly getting wiped of the face of the Earth by a lorry who wasn't clever enough to check his mirrors before changing lanes. Thank god for the hard shoulder is all I really want to say on that subject. The research went well once more, this pair of birds had a completely different enclosure design to any of the other birds I had observed, this alone was fantastic, but finding out that they are relatives of original birds bought over from the Falklands after the war was a great bit of information. I also had an interesting chat with a visitor who had obviously been close with the park for a number of years, he said that no outside noise had ever bothered the birds (relevant because there is a train line parallel to the edge of the park) except for one, that of Concorde increasing the thrusters as it gained altitude after taking off. There's a Matt fun fact for you, you can have that one for free.

So that's the summer research out of the way, the rest of my spare time was left doing something that I truly love. Volunteering at the falconry center. I had a great summer there, for the most part helping out with the displays outside of the center, such as at steam rallies, other wildlife parks ect. I got to talk to the public once more, something that I think I've really gotten good at recently (Social skills +1 = LEVEL UP!). I also made sure plenty of people got a chance to hold the birds whilst being educated even a little bit, which makes it all worth while. The highlight though would definitely be doing training with a young Ural Owl called Archie who had recently come back to the center from London Zoo. All in all I'd say I've had a pretty successful summer, plenty of good times to distract me from the bad times! That's also me up to date, no more back dating posts! 

Me with Wotan the Bald Eagle

Me after doing some training with Archie the Ural Owl at Cotswold Wildlife Park

Matt.

Introduction / The Dissertation begins

So... this is blogging. Interesting. I've been meaning to get on here for some time, people kept recommending that I start a blog, maybe for expression purposes, or maybe its because people got fed up of seeing my long winded statuses, moans and rants on facebook! (I jest). My aim is that this blog will become my gateway to talk about my uni work, my future endeavors and the trials of life that we all must face. So in the words of Khan,

"Shall we begin?"

The subject  

So year 3 of university is upon me but my dissertation journey began back in May. I knew from the start that I wanted to focus my study on an avian species. At first I thought about investigating native species (I had recently been inspired to really get my hooks into British wildlife by Springwatch, Autumnwatch & Winterwatch). I thought about placing cameras in nest boxes & investigating feeding & chick survival (actually based on a little thing they did on Springwatch, more on my love of that program later though). However, getting the relevant licenses, finding the time & measuring all the possible variables would have made it impossible & actually very expensive considering my time scale for the research project. May quickly drew to an end & it was back to basics, strip my ideas down to the bone. After several frustrating mind boggling lectures at uni later one thing that one of my lecturers said struck a cord, "what is your first love?" Then like a plank of obvious wood it hit me, birds of prey. My favourite group of animals, after all I have been working with them for 6 years.

Once I had the idea it was trying to expand it past 3 words which challenged me (that sounds worse written down then it did in my head), I did hours of research examining what was already out there, paper wise, & in all honesty there wasn't a lot, and that was the point. Whilst numerous ecological & conservation studies had been carried out on wild raptors, in captivity it was a different story, there were a few behavioural studies and some very influential authors in the area but nothing really up to date with recent animal behavioural advances. This struck me as something that needed looking at, after all birds of prey are quickly becoming a common site within most of Britain's zoos & wildlife parks, along with falconry becoming more popular within the general population. So time to pick a species & study.

The study & species

First on the list was the species, and I must say I went for a not very obvious choice (to my delight). I ended up picking the Striated Caracara (Phalcoboenus australis). First of all it has an amazing ecology & a checkered past. For many years it was persecuted harshly by the people of the Falkland Islands, severely decreasing its numbers, however, since the 1970's we began to protect this interesting little falcon until today in 2013 we are near full holding capacity around the country due to numerous successful breeding programs, along with a recovery of birds in the wild.

Striated Caracara at Cotswold Falconry Center

So with species sorted it was onto the study itself. After long deliberation and battles (with myself) I settled on a behavioural observation to help form a baseline of behaviours for these birds in captivity, along with an analyse & comparison of enclosure design and complexity. I got my plan through the ethics at university and then it was all a reality. Was i ready to go out into the world and do dissertation research? On my own. Hell I didn't feel like I was ready, but after the year I've had so far, it was time to take control, get back on the tracks and back on course, something that personal issues had all but destroyed earlier in the year.

Matt