Writing up your PhD is an all encompassing task that leaves you with almost no spare time to do anything remotely fun. It is incredible that the intensity of work can reach this high and that deadlines can appear so frequently. This is one of the reasons I’ve not posted for so long, The other is that as I am not in the field I am seldom experiencing the kind of moments I can write about to make parrot work seem glamorous and enviable! What is remarkable though, is that I am not actually hating this part of parrot research as I, and everyone who knows me probably thought I would.
It is fair to say that I’m the kind of person that likes adventure. I do extreme sports and activities, and I love to feeling of pushing my own boundaries. Until this blasted PhD sapped my energy I could barely sit still, or is that age catching up? So how on earth can I be satisfied with sitting in an office crouching over a laptop looking at rows and rows of numbers?
I think it is because after those three arduous (yet glamourous and enviable!) field seasons this number crunching and analysis is really bringing it all together. It doesn’t matter that I am having to learn to use a horrid statistics package, nor that my posture is so bad I have neck pain, nor that I wake up at stupid o’clock unable to go back to sleep because maybe if I excluded the nests found with chicks from the analysis I might find the truth!
So it is coming together but what does that mean? Well so far it means I’ve been able to sort out all the data on reproductive success and see what patterns are there. Compared to other Amazons those on Bonaire are doing ok but not great. I’m not going to even begin to explain that here, I’ll leave it as a cliff hanger until a future PsttaScene article appears!
Next up I will be looking at the factors that affect reproductive success, do pairs in “good habitat” areas do better than those in poor habitat areas? Do pairs using tree nests produce more chicks than pairs using cliff nests? Do pairs in areas where there are several nests do better than pairs with isolated pairs? The list goes on, as indeed does time and so I really ought to go and get back to those stats…..
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