Refl3ction

As for my chosen topic of research, I have essentially decided upon researching horses. I have done a good bit of skimming to find the major issues plaguing national equine health, as well as credibility to the argument that horses are intelligent animals.

Since the moment that we did our initial research and cast a wide net over our research terms, I was drawn to horses. I have had very few real interactions with horses, and I always find researching a new topic more interesting than probing one that I already have a baseline level of understanding with.

In that sense, my decision was narrowed down to horses and birds, and I could tell from reading my colleagues’ responses to our class discussions that birds were a more popular option, so I opted for the other to bring some variety into the mix.

Wild Horses running along the plain. (WABI 5)

My research process this week consisted of writing down some new keywords and exploring them to see if they went anywhere, and documenting my results. I find it especially handy to create a “workspace” of sorts, which consists of a few tabs of important sites – namely, Google Scholar, Google News, NPR, Google, CSMonitor, and the UCI database.

From there, I check every tab with the new keywords I would like to try, and see what I can get. I find that Google Scholar/News both help the most, since they cast a very wide net that I can refine by using quotation marks, and provide the most credible sources out of all of the others.

I also performed a bit of research into the researchers that we learned about in Bird Brain. I noticed that the name “John Marzluff” had been coming up alot, so I will direct my research towards him, and inquire to see if he has any pertinent research.

John Marzluff releasing a crow back into the wild (National Audobon Society)