STANDS FOR YEARS 2001-8

The photographs and database records use 3 synonyms for each of the six extensively documented stands or platforms (2 at each locality).

LOCALITY / STAND NAMES / ABBREVIATIONS IN RECORDS
South / North / South / North
Saugeen / WES / MID / sw / sm
Jokers / ONE / TWO / jo / jt
Monastery / BAR / LAU / mb / ml

The SOURCE spreadsheets for the Jokers Hill stands ONE and TWO are the easiest to understand because, apart from 1-2 harvests, there have been no changes in management over the 8 years at that locality.

NEST BOXES

Each stand or platform of the 2 stands at a locality bears (years 2001-2006) 3 nest boxes or “hives” within each of which are 5 stacks of nest blocks (7-9 blocks per stack). The 3 boxes were typically arranged in a vertical roman L shape, 2 boxes high and 2 broad when seen from the front (from the east) , except in year 2002 when they formed a single vertical stack or 2007? when there were 2 boxes, one on top the other. In years 2007-8 equipment was reduced to a total of 4 and then 3 boxes at a locality.

NEST BLOCK POSITIONS

These are formed from the box number (1=bottom nest box, 2=upper, 3=side or in 2002 topmost box), stack number within the nest box (left 1 to 5 right) and row number within the stack (1 at the bottom, 7-9 at the top depending on the thicknesses of the blocks). Thus block jt315 is the 5th block from the bottom of stack 1 (the left most) in side box 3 of stand TWO at Jokers Hill. More generally, if X is an unspecified digit, then jtX1X are all the leftmost blocks in each box of stand TWO, jtX5X are all the blocks in the rightmost stacks, jt3XX are all the blocks in its side box 3, and jtXX1 are the blocks at the bottoms of the stacks. These position details reappear in the column headers of the SOURCE spreadsheets.

MANAGEMENT

The aim has been to leave each nest block in its place for few years, but every so often there have been tiny to major changes that are documented and coded in the SOURCE spreadsheets and in the locality_Information workbooks. Jokers Hill (i.e., stands ONE & TWO) has the simplest management history. At all stands culls and harvests are coded nest by nest, with supplementary text at the top of each generation’s worksheet and at the top of each stack’s data.

In year 2007 the occupants of one box of each stand were given to the ZOO356 Class and their nesting sites taken out of the field population. In the new regime the 2 remaining boxs at each stand formed a single vertical stack, with 1XX at the bottom and 2XX at the top. In 2008 there was a further reduction of equipment to only 3 boxes at each locality.

2009 has been, as it were, a sabbatical year from field work. Kyla Ercit (Darryl Gwynne lab UTM) has continued at Jokers. If I resume field work in 2010 it will be with initially empty equipment to "replicate" the first 2-3 years population growth at each of the 3 localities.

CAVITY POSITIONS and WIDTHS

All the U-section cavities (bores, holes, grooves or lanes) in a nest block are of the same length (105 mm) and effective diameter. In the spreadsheets cavities are numbered 1-5, left to right, as seen from the front of the block. The number of cavities in a nest block depends on the cavity width, and cavity width is a major constraint on the species encountered. Photos and records refer to each of the 5 cavity widths in 3 ways.

letter code / Z / A / B / C / D
by cavity width / 3.2 mm / 4.8 mm / 6.4 mm / 8.0 mm / 9.6 mm
usual # cavities/block / 8 / 7 / 6 / 5 / 4

Blocks of cavity width Z A or B are 3.2 mm vertically thinner than C or D. One or two very old blocks have only 4 (C, D) or 5 (A, B) cavities.

CAVITY ADDRESSES

Putting all this together the full address jt1116B refers to the 6th (rightmost) cavity in a block with 6.4 mm cavities at the bottom left of the bottom nest box of the TWO stand at Jokers Hill.

DATA SHEETS

In the SOURCE spreadsheets the densely coded records of column W are expanded, in a few cases to almost the full width of a spreadsheet. The locality_Information documents, e.g., SAUGEEN_Information, contain diaries, site plans, and very early records.

ANCILLIARY DATA

The directory 05_Ancilliary_data gives miscellaneous useful data, including the results of laboratory hatches.

INDEPENDENT FIELDWORK

There are 20 nest boxes and a 1000 nest blocks at the University of Toronto’s Koffler Scientific Reserve at Jokers Hill. Enquiries should be addressed to the Director, Professor Arthur Weiss.

A description of the equipment is given in Hallett, PE (2001d) Amer. Bee J. 141, 441-444.