DOI: 10.5061/dryad.c866t1gc9
title: Hanging out in the outback: the use of social hotspots by wild zebra finches

description: The social and spatial organisation of avian societies is often complex
 and dynamic with individuals socialising with others in a local
 population. Although social interactions can readily be described in
 colonial breeders through the location of nests, social interactions
 regularly take place in other contexts that are often not considered.
 Social behaviour in the colonially breeding zebra finch, Taeniopygia
 guttata, has been the focus of much work in the laboratory, but very
 little is known about their social organisation in free-living
 populations, especially outside the breeding context. Here we characterise
 semi-permanent gathering locations, or ‘social hotspots’ in the zebra
 finch in the wild. We determined the use of such social hotspots and the
 resulting group dynamics by quantifying movements to and from these
 locations through direct observation and by quantifying the vocal activity
 at these locations using acoustic recorders. We show that, throughout the
 day, zebra finches regularly visit these hotspots, and the hotspots are
 occupied for a substantial proportion of the day. Individuals typically
 arrived and left in pairs, or small groups, indicating that these social
 hotspots do not function just for flock formation. Instead, the high
 levels of vocal activity at these hotspots indicate that they may
 potentially function as local hubs for socialisation and information
 exchange, whilst also perhaps providing safety-in-numbers benefits to
 individuals during periods of resting. These findings characterise an
 important component of the natural social life of one of the most widely
 studied birds in captivity. The characterisation of these social hotspots
 highlights the use of landmarks by birds to facilitate social contacts,
 cohesion, and behaviour, in a social bird. Similar hangouts and social
 hotspots may be a feature of social behaviour in other multi-level
 aggregative species in which the fission and fusion of groups is an
 important component of daily life.
description: This dataset collection describes data from three different
 methods that we combined in order to describe the presence and usage of
 social hotspots in wild zebra finches. These hotspots are temporally
 stable locations, either in bushes or (shrub-like) trees, where zebra
 finches come and go, and spend substantial time. Hangouts, periods of time
 when the hotspot is occupied, regularly take place at these meeting
 locations. The data was collected from October–December 2019 at UNSW
 Fowlers Gap Arid Zone Research Station in New South Wales, Australia, home
 to a well-studied population of wild zebra finches. The three methods
 are:<br><br>a) Dropping counts<br>We counted zebra finch
 droppings under bushes/trees in 10x10 cm squares in order to identify
 and/or confirm which vegetation was substantially used by zebra finches.
 For each site we identified also a 'control tree' which was
 nearby and similar, but where we observed a lower amount of droppings.
 These 'social tree' – 'control tree' pairs were then
 used for the rest of the study. The droppings.csv dataset contains
 repeated (over several days) dropping counts for these pairs (n = 10 tree
 pairs).<br><br>b) Focal observations<br>We conducted two
 full-day observations (from before dawn till dusk) of social hotspot and
 control tree pairs (n = 7 tree pairs), where we quantified the group size
 of each arriving and departing group of zebra finches, as well as kept
 track of the number of zebra finches on the social hotspot and the control
 tree. This dataset describes the group dynamics at these sites over time.
 The hangout_observations.csv dataset contains all the arrival and
 departure events that we observed during these observation
 days.<br><br>c) Audio recordings<br>We put
 time-programmed recorders in the social hotspots and control trees (n = 10
 tree pairs) to quantify how much time zebra finches were spending at each
 respective tree, and more precisely, how often vocal activity took place.
 To do this, we measured for one full day of recording (about 12h) every
 bout of zebra finch vocal activity (where a silence of 5 minutes
 demarcates the end of a vocal activity bout). Several of these recorded
 days were the same as the days during which we did the focal observations,
 so that we could also compare and validate the results of both
 methodologies. The hangout_acoustics.csv dataset contains all the vocal
 activity bouts.<br><br>For further details on how the data was
 collected, we refer to the (open-access) related article in Journal of
 Avian Biology.
description: We included a README file that contains descriptions of all
 variables in all files that are part of this dataset collection here on
 Dryad, and also of the software elements (R and python code) that are
 uploaded to Zenodo. The readme also describes which files are the raw
 datasets, which are the processed ones, and which are the files to process
 raw into processed files.