Observational Study Of Aggression

Methods
The methods to this observational behavioral study are quite simple. Every day at eight o’clock in the morning, I would walk out to the front lawn of Broward hall and observe the behaviors of the many squirrels that lived in the area during the breeding season. This was the first part of my observational study. These observations would become my experimental data to compare to the control that would be studied in the off season. My days started on Wednesday so I can observe behavior on both human-populated days and human deserted days. I would take notes on movement, posturing, interspecies interactions, intraspecies interactions, and the general health of the squirrel population. The observations were primarily observational in nature due to the lack of trapping, tagging, and other equipment to take more quantitate observations. After the breeding season had ended, I record the same kinds
of observations during the same time of day, 8 o’clock in the morning, in order to stay consistent with the squirrel’s circadian rhythm. This set of observations acted as my control to compare with the behaviors exhibited during the breeding season. I stayed in the same area during the same time of day, during the same weekdays, and wrote down the same kind of observations. This was split into two weeks, about one month apart, one week was in the height of the breeding seasons (mid-February), and the second week as right after the breeding season (the last week of March). I was sure to not feed, bother, or interact with the squirrels in any way to get to as close to their natural behaviors as possible. Any limitations in this research is due to the scattered population of grey squirrels, the lack of proper squirrel viewing equipment, and the short observation time.
Results
Over the two weeks of observing the squirrels, I saw that the numbers of squirrels between the two weeks remained pretty similar, with slightly less squirrels running about during the non-breeding week. The busiest day for squirrels appeared to be on Friday, where there is less student foot traffic, but still a good amount of food to be found.
Squirrels appeared to be moderately affected by the presence of humans. They were most present during the days of heavy foot traffic, such as on Fridays, then on days of little to no foot traffic, such as the weekends. This was uniform during both the breeding season and the non-breeding season. This implies that the breeding season had little to do with the observable presence of squirrels themselves.

Throughout the breeding week, I saw plenty of aggressive behaviors, the most common being mating chases around trees.
I also saw a few fights between two or more squirrels as they fought over scraps of food. The level of aggression was much higher here than in the nonbreeding week, where I saw no mating chases and next to no fights. There was still some aggression as squirrels chased each other from their respective trees. Over the nonbreeding week, I saw more foraging behavior than from the breeding week. Foraging was still the most prevalent part of the squirrels’ day, but this behavior increased as there were less people around and when the overall breeding season ended. In the breeding season, there was a much higher amount of aggressive chasing, tail flagging, aggressive vocal chatter, and biting between squirrel than in the non-breeding season. In summary, the amount of noticeable aggression towards other squirrels were much higher in the breeding season than in the non-breeding season. Vigilance and foraging behavior was slightly higher in the non-breeding
season.