limiations13th Feb 2025Limitations
Four. It's the first few steps of the would-be walk that define whether to go, or return. There are limitations that affect actvity, in me and other animals. For me it is the first four steps: enough to assess the risk of venturing out. Ignore the weather, and the context of not going out, and you would gain a false understanding of my behaviour. Data have limitations, and contexts.
These limitations underpin much of what we see, and our perception of what animals do. In the run up to Valentine's day, the song thrushes are full steam ahead. c 600m apart, three were triangulating their competitors in the gloaming . Initially, there was little hubbub in the background: the city slickers had not begun to cross the valley in their 4x4s, or powerful coupes. The thrushes increased volume as the sound soup deepened. Then, shortly after, light was enough to feed, and competition with the traffic rendered energy use expensive. Detection had become compromised: time and noise were the major limitations to deciding if there were thrushes at all. Go there an hour later, and there was nothing.
A day before, the spindrift of drizzle had taken hold. With a brisk westerly, the costs of being out and about had to be weighed against those of exposure and drying out. Even mallards were missing from action. My point counts showed low single figures. Weather was clearly a limiting factor. Ask a bat when to pop out for a snack, and the answer last weekend was not yet.
The bat group's third winter count showed high numbers of bats tucked up in crevices in caves, tunnels and ice houses. Some years, if the previous week has been warm, then there might well be some restless bats as a torch beam homes in on them. Not this weekend, after a cold week, and lower than usual background temperatures. Some of the sites were also flooded, raising the humidity and reducing the site's suitability for roosting.
Floods themselves pose severe limitations on where/ how/ who uses a site. Forget this, and the result is a data set that flatters and decieves. Limitations bedevil our lives, and those of other species too. Forget limitations, and you do so at your peril- yet a local planning application has done just that. Hopefully, provison of missing data to the planners will make them think again, rather than accept the submission and its major limitations. |
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