Heads Up on Local Wildlife

If you’ve logged in to Chicago Wildlife Watch and are entering data from our Urban Wildlife Biodiversity Monitoring project, you’ve noticed we’re collecting information on the species, the number of individuals and the presence of young in more than 1 million photos of Chicago wildlife. This information helps us understand what types of habitat Chicago’s urban wildlife prefers and how that might change over time.

Deer are among the Chicago-area species spotted by the Urban Wildlife Institute's extensive network of "camera traps."

But we also have asked participants to indicate the behavior of the animal in the photo by choosing from four categories: head up, head down, neither and not visible. You might be asking, why did the Urban Wildlife Institute choose these four categories and nothing else? And what do these categories mean?

Let’s start with the basics of behavioral monitoring. Together, these four categories of behavior are called an ethogram, or a catalog of mutually exclusive behaviors that apply to a species of study. We are interested in understanding how wildlife perceive the urban environment and if that changes from the city to the suburbs and across different habitats. Our ethogram is relatively simple, as it has to apply to the many different species we see in our photos, all of which exhibit very different behaviors.

The concept of “head up” and “head down” is commonly studied in behavioral ecology as these behaviors indicate how risky an animal perceives its environment to be at that particular moment. If an animal’s head is up, it is alert and aware of the environment. If the head is down, the animal probably does not perceive there to be an immediate risk and is taking some time to forage.

Note the position of the head relative to the shoulders of the rabbit in each photo. The rabbit on the left is “head up,” whereas the rabbit on the right would be considered “head down.”

All animals exhibit some form of “head up” and “head down.” A squirrel might be alert because it hears a dog approaching, whereas a coyote might perceive a group of people walking by to be dangerous. Risks such as humans, pets and predators might vary across the urban-rural gradient for different species.

To categorize the behaviors we see in the photos, we look for the animal’s shoulders as our guide. If the head is above the shoulders, it is considered to be “head up.” If the head is below the shoulders, we consider it to be “head down.”

In many cases, the animal’s head is aligned with the shoulders, or it is lying on the ground, making it difficult to determine a behavior. If we don’t see an obvious example of “head up” or “head down” we enter “neither.” Don’t worry if you are pressing the “neither” button often. Because we have thousands and thousands of photos, we are looking for very clear examples of these behaviors. If a pattern exists, we are sure to find it across our huge sample size!

In this photo, the coyote on the left is “head down” while the coyote on the right is lying on the ground. We would enter this coyote’s behavior as “neither.”

By looking for these behaviors, the zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute can gain more insight into how animals perceive the urban environment. The more we know about wildlife in urban areas, the better we can conserve and manage them in the future.

Liza Watson Lehrer

Liza Watson Lehrer is an urban wildlife ecologist in Lincoln Park Zoo's Urban Wildlife Institute.

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Camera Trap Slideshow Members of Lincoln Park Zoo's Urban Wildlife Institute recently installed camera traps at secret locations in wooded areas around Chicago. See a slideshow of wildlife they "captured."