Look carefully! Picture of the day: A Great Tit (?), ISO 100, 196 mm, f/5.6, 1/160.
Earlier this week we had a field exercise in distance sampling – really makes you think about how difficult it can be to spot what you’re looking for! Really so if you’re looking for something that’s (kind-of) camouflaged, small, and you don’t really know where it’s hiding!
To illustrate the problem and the importance of proper detection functions (so we can correct for the amount of counts that we miss, depending on how hard they are to see at different distances), faculty had put up a fun little exercise where we would walk along a road (our “transect”), and try to find as many of the wooden grill-sticks they had placed out as possible (total hidden around 28).
Finding 22, my group didn’t quite get there, sticks are remarkably difficult to spot when they’re behind brushes and trees – but our estimate of the total landed somewhere between 26- 30, which is pretty close!