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November 30, 2006  By Their Numbers Numbers are interesting. Numbers can do magic. Numbers can say more than words. If we were to build a description of a person based solely on asking questions - the answer to which were numbers - how accurate a picture would we get? It seems likely there would be little we did not know once the numbers were in. We might start with questions about height, weight, shoe size, pant size, shirt size, or any number of questions about physical size. And then we could add blood pressure, blood sugar, heart rate, and cholesterol level. Our description could become more telling than actually seeing the person. IQ numbers, school test results, and number of years in school would add much to the picture. Next we might extend our description by asking the figure in their bank accounts, or their salary, and the amount they pay each month in bills. How many houses do they own? How many rooms in each house? How many vehicles do they have and how many miles are driven in a year. We could go on but as you can see, numbers do describe a person better than many other means. None of these thoughts came to me a few days ago when I stood by the window and watched Chickadees come and go from the feeders. The sheer volume of activity made me wonder if I could put a number to what I saw. Eureka! I had it! I could randomly choose a length of time and record the number of feeder visits, species of Chickadees doing the visiting, and which of the four feeders was visited. What a treasure trove of information I would retrieve! I was so excited by the prospect that for my first tally I forgot to choose a particular span of time in which to count - I simply plunged in and made my notations. By the time 12 minutes elapsed there were 100 visits to the feeders. The gazebo feeder was the most popular and the suet feeder was the least popular. Other information revealed thirty-four visits by Mountain Chickadees and 66 by Black-capped Chickadees. Upon further perusal of my information sheet I noticed an attempt to record other feeder users such as Nuthatches and various Woodpeckers. I guess I wanted it all. Next, I sat down with my red-hot data sheet and figured out seed consumption per hour, per day, and per year. Of course none of this means much given that at this point I had done only one count, but random as the first try was, I did learn a lot. However, it quickly became apparent that documenting the species, number of visits and feeder being visited, was an overwhelming task with the number of Chickadees involved. In the future, I decided to leave out which particular feeder the Chickadees favoured. After looking at the ratio of Mountain Chickadees to Black-capped Chickadees the 33% I extrapolated quite accurately described what I guessed about the numbers of each type of bird. Black-caps easily outnumbered Mountains and though I stood in the yard on many occasions and watched the flocks tumble down through the now-dead pines, I could not get a total number of all Chickadees involved nor a separate number for each species. Now, I was completely in thrall to statistics and numbers. I imagined unwrapping mysteries that would not be solved through the use of simple eyesight. I had to do more surveys. By the end of the first day I conducted twelve more ten-minute interval visit tallies. And later I tallied birds over the course of four days in all kinds of weather. Total visits per ten-minute period varied from a low of 100 on the first day, to a high of 203 yesterday, in mid afternoon in the heart of a very cold spell. The average number of visits was about 170 per ten-minute period. The ratio of Mountains to Black-caps ranged from 20% to 35% more. At first all this data seemed revealing and interesting. When I was finished, however, I still felt I had learned very little about the local Chickadees. Too bad they don’t come with seed accounts, and deeds to cavity trees. With that sort of information I could not only know my subjects I could manipulate them. I could mastermind a Chickadee slave empire! Ah, but that’s the domain of humans, and as yet, they’re not showing up at my bird feeders. To e-mail Tom CLICK HERE To look at previous column CLICK HERE |
