Effects of human activity on Royal penguins on Macquarie Island

Neighbour refers to the behavioural control file for each sample (neighbouring nests did not recieve an artificial egg, and provide a behavioural control for responses to human approaches without the scientific treatment). Nest refers to the randomly used nest markers for each sample. Heart rate refers to whether heart rate was concurrently recorded with behaviour on the sample (both stored on Hi-8 tape).

Stimulus refers to whether single persons or groups of persons (5 -7, recorded within each sample) were used for the human approaches. Environment refers to whether approaches were conducted from colony sections abuting pebbly beach or from poa tussock environs (tussock approaches less than 50 m of the poa / pebbly beach junction). The code system for nest simply refers to the numbered tag placed at the nest (using three colours, g=green, w=white, b=brown) which were used randomly.

The fields in this dataset are: Sample Date Breeding Phase Stimulus Type Environment Colony Nest Tape Heart Rate Temp File Neighbour