Having a gander at goose behaviour. Evaluating time-activity of captive and wild geese at two different wetland sites
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Geese are not common subjects for behavioural investigation in zoological facilities, despite their popularity in waterfowl collections and their complex ecological needs. This research evaluated time-activity budgets of six goose species housed at two UK Wildfowl & Wetland Trust (WWT) centres, comparing captive population behaviours with two species of wild goose. Using a standardised ethogram and instantaneous focal sampling, we recorded over 220 hours of behavioural data across 892 observations. All data were recorded in spring and summer of 2015, 2017 and 2018. Data were analysed using linear mixed models and zero-inflated models to account for high frequencies of zero occurrences in alert and social behaviours. Results show that whilst captive and wild geese broadly perform similar species-typical behaviours, captive birds exhibited higher levels of resting and lower social engagement. Foraging and locomotion differed significantly by species, and this may be a factor of ecological niche. Minimal stereotypic behaviour (<2% of observations) was recorded in the captive birds, suggesting that the large, naturalistic enclosures provided by WWT support positive welfare by enabling appetitive behaviours, such as grazing. However, high inactivity rates highlight the need for further enrichment and dynamic enclosure management to be considered to further improve goose behavioural diversity. Comparisons with wild geese provide useful benchmarks for evaluating behavioural normality under human care. This research supports the use of time-activity budgets as a practical tool for developing evidence-based, species-specific husbandry guidelines. We recommend future research focusses on long-term, individual-bird behavioural monitoring, seasonal comparisons, and the incorporation of personality profiling to further our understanding of how geese respond to their captive care at the population, species and individual bird level.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".