Vulturine guineafowl (Acryllium vulturinum) are the largest species of guineafowl and are highly social, predominantly terrestrial and are found in semi-arid savannas of East Africa. This project seeks to better understand their social structure and decision-making across ecological contexts— but how does one answer questions about the collective movement, social dynamics, and fitness consequences of these intriguing birds? By incorporating state-of-the-art technology and computational techniques with life-time monitoring of individuals!

In 2016, the social lives of these brilliantly blue birds became the focus of the Vulturine Guineafowl Project. In their eight years of existence, the project team has captured and marked more than 2000 individuals and equipped slightly over 400 of them with solar-powered GPS tags. Combining the detailed information about seasonal home range and movement of each group, together with daily censuses of group membership and social interactions will provide the basis for answering mechanistic questions: from understanding the ontogeny of social positions to the consequences of living in different types of groups. This understanding, together with knowledge about their general ecological needs, will help understand the interplay between the social behaviour of the birds and their environment.

The team hopes that these unique long-term, large-scale, and high-resolution data will provide the critical pieces for answering key questions about the evolution of animal societies.

University: Max Planck Institute for Animal Behaviour, Starnberg, Germany

Primary Investigator: Dr. Damien Farine, dfarine@ab.mpg.de

Project Manager: Kennedy Kipkorir

Project start: 2016