House sparrow field research update

A still image captured from video footage at one of the field sites.

I’m reporting back to you with an update on the house sparrow research project we launched in 2023. Through this project, we hope to validate new behavioral indicators of welfare in the house sparrow (Passer domesticus), and publish a series of papers with our findings.

For the previous mid-project update, see here.

Fieldwork: Complete

We finished fieldwork in August! Our fieldwork involved banding 28 birds so that we could identify individuals in our video footage, and running a series of experiments to induce expected welfare states. (Birds opted into the experimental stage and could come and go as they pleased.) For example, providing abundant food would result in an expected positive welfare state, while limiting entrances to a feeder would cause competition and result in an expected negative welfare state. For more details on the fieldwork, see last year’s project update.

Total, we conducted four interventions at five sites along these lines, and collected over 50 hours of video footage and 25 hours of vocalization audio.

What’s next: Statistical analysis of video and audio data

Now we will review (“score”) the video footage we collected with a software called Observer XT that allows us to tag the behaviors we observe, based on a list of behaviors we create ourselves. For example, if we are interested in flying behavior and assign the tag “F” for flying, then each time we see a bird flying in the video, we’ll hit “F.” We will use these kinds of tags for at least 20 different behaviors. 

Observer XT converts our tags into a spreadsheet that allows us to statistically assess the data. We want to see if the different behavioral indicators that we’re interested in change consistently with positive or negative welfare states.

We’ll go through a similar process with the audio data, but using a different software designed for audio instead of video.

We expect this portion of the project to take at least three months.

Presenting the research

Ideally the data analysis will result in the validation of at least one new welfare indicator. But because of the small sample size, it’s possible that we will not quite achieve validation — instead, we will be able to advise future researchers on which possible indicators seemed the most promising, and encourage them to replicate this study and build on it. With their data added to the set, perhaps those indicators would be validated.

Regardless of the results, it’s important to share our work with the scientific community so they can learn from it. I have already presented some information about the methods of this project at a conference (the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting), and I’ve submitted a paper about our capture methods to the Journal of Field Ornithology. When that paper is published, you’ll find it in our Library.