Crunching Hummingbird Nests

Posted at 11:27 AM, Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Andie has been helping me make sense of black-chinned hummingbird nest data sheets. Notice the great artwork by a field assistant on the sheet.

I am helping the Forest Service determine if fuel reduction treatments lower or increase nest survival of these little guys. To measure nest survival, one must first determine daily survival rate. To do this, I am going through about 700 nest sheets and I’ve entered the length and survival of over 2000 observation intervals into an excel file. Soon, I will plug this data into a logistic exposure model that uses an inverse log-link function to incorporate interval time into a daily survival rate estimate. I have written the code for this procedure, and now I just need to proof the data for errors. I hope to post initial results soon!