Folsom Zoo Observation

On March 22nd, 2017, my group, Group #16, sought after the most active or fairly interesting animal at the Folsom Zoo Sanctuary, located around Old Folsom in Folsom, CA. We spent time observing the black-tailed mule deer currently inhabiting the sanctuary and tried to come up with accurate and meaningful behaviors to measure while we observed the creature. While there, she walked around, laid down, and enjoyed her time in the spacious habitat provided to her in the quaint sanctuary. We arrived around 10:00am, didn’t start observing until around 10:30am, and watched the deer and measured behaviors until a little before 11am. Following initial and unofficial observation, but before inputting data into our ethogram, we established behaviors

However, our ethograms did show some differences in our results. We had a total of 10 observable behaviors and we recorded for a total of 20 minutes which left us opportunities for 200 agreements or disagreements. Overall, we agreed 190 of the times and we only had 10 disagreements. After discussing our observation and our results, we also concluded that the few disagreements we did have were simply from a missed observation during that interval or small misunderstandings between us. One of the disagreements in a few of the intervals, was deciding if the black tail deer was playing with a spider web or actually playing with the cage. Another disagreement between us during the observation was deciding rather the deer was moving its tail at a particular time or it was just a part of shaking its entire body. Our reliability report calculation indicated that 95% of our observation was agreed upon and only a small percentage was not, indicating we all observed the same behaviors with a clear concept of what behaviors we were looking for and how we needed to record