Visualizing behaviour of individual laying hens in groups

Tracking individual hens in a flock is extremely challenging. With tracking devices mounted on the birds it is possible to asses where a hen is or has been. In this presentation I will discuss how we can visualize hen’s behaviour patterns with the use of location data obtained with ultrawide band tracking. With data from indoor and outdoor kept hens we are able to asses time spent in certain zones, location preferences, distance travelled, (stability of) daily patterns and locomotion speed. We have also attempted to asses proximity by looking at distance to other flock members, so far only conducted under small experimental groups. I compared heat maps and line patterns of video software (Ethovision) and tracking software (Tracklab) and found a high consistency after several corrections in the Tracklab software package. But the consistency between video image and UWB tracking indicates that the tracking does reflect the movement of an animal in a set indoor space. In an outdoor space where precipitation and vegetation can influence signal strength, location detection was found to be less accurate. However, hens were tracked over several days which allowed us to assess missing data points by estimation using the location before and after the missing sample points. With these longitudinal data, we were able look at daily patterns, observation rate in specific zones (which can be used for preference) and several activity measurements. Visualizing patterns of movement of individual hens with longitudinal data can make figures very blurry and indescribable. Downsizing the dataset to consistent data over birds over only a few specific days can help for visualization, but should not be used for data analysis or solely for data interpretation.