First day of training...

Hiya :)

Back from my first day of training, had plenty of fresh air today - very windy! Woke up at 6:20 this morning to the sound of 4 young boys (children of the couple I'm staying with) running around the house and playing. Had a relatively late start to the day; started out to the New Forest at around 9:45 to start off my field research training.

What Andy (the scientific director) attempted to teach me first was about transects. A transect is a line in which you record what you see and hear and today the length was 100 metres. You record everything thats within 20 and 50 metres to the left and right of where you walk. Goodness me its hard! Andy was identifying bird calls as well as birds flying overhead, left right and centre. But I think I managed to pick up a couple of bird calls! I guess it all takes practice...

We then went to another area (you'll have to forgive me there as I can't remember where it was, I'll be sure to tell you all if I remember, but one of the lakes was called Lake Ivy) which was primarily to learn how to count animals, more specifically birds again. We went to a couple of hides and I learnt how to efficiently (well.. mostly!) count birds on large expanses of water. In both instances I counted the number of Coots on the water through binoculars. It has to be done by splitting the water into sections and recording the number of individuals in that area otherwise it can be very hard to keep count! You have to do that three times and then take an average of each total number. Its quite tricky but I'm sure I'll get more accurate the more I do it. But man alive I've never seen so many Coots in one place before!

Thats only a simplified version of what I've been upto today. My brain is very tired haha. But its all good! After we got home at about 4:20, I did some washing up (with a big household theres always washing up to do!) and yeah, just chilling out now!
If I haven't told you enough then shoot me some questions and I'll do my best to answer them :)

Tomorrow is a day at home doing computer and administration related stuff :) Feeling a bit scared about my future job, but I think I'm going to enjoy it!

Hope you're all good. Expect another update tomorrow evening!

Peace out dudes... x