What Gets Lost Between the Field and the Report
Wildlife relocation events generate data at a rate that handwritten field sheets simply cannot keep up with. You're processing an animal, fitting a transmitter, logging coordinates, noting the family group, recording the frequency, managing observers and guests who've never seen a beaver up close, and tracking elapsed time against daylight and tidal windows — all simultaneously. The notes made in those conditions are abbreviated, sometimes illegible, and almost always incomplete by the time you're back at the desk transcribing them.
The problem isn't the field work. The problem is the gap between the event and the permanent record. Every hour that passes between closing the trap and entering structured data is an hour where details compress, where transmitter number 47 and transmitter 74 become genuinely interchangeable in your memory, where "north bank near the culvert" has to do the work of precise coordinates.
Relocation programs that rely on paper chain-of-custody forms also struggle with observer accountability. Who was on site? Who handled the animal? Who confirmed transmitter attachment and frequency verification? These aren't bureaucratic questions — they're the questions you'll need answered if an animal shows up dead six weeks later and you're reviewing the event record to determine whether the stress of translocation was a contributing factor.
The Architecture of a Clean Relocation Record
The template centers the record on individual animal identity — Beaver ID, Beaver number, Family Name — which is the right hierarchy for a multi-year program. Individual ID ties to the animal's history across all prior events. Family Name provides the relational context for understanding territory disruption and reestablishment patterns. Number is your operational shorthand for field communication.
Transmitter attachment is a binary field backed by frequency and transmitter number. This structure matters because it forces disambiguation at entry time. You either have a transmitter on this animal or you don't. If yes, you record the exact frequency (which goes into your receiver schedules) and the transmitter number (which ties to your equipment inventory and battery replacement log). A field that just says "transmitter: yes" is nearly useless two seasons from now when you're trying to figure out which unit is broadcasting a weak signal from a drainage ditch three kilometers from the release site.
The coordinates field with GPS location capture is the difference between a record that's permanently useful and one that becomes archaeologically interesting. A text note that says "released at the east fork confluence" requires local knowledge to interpret and degrades in value as staff turns over. A pinned coordinate is exact, is mappable, and can be filtered against future detection data to calculate dispersal distance without any additional reconstruction work.
Elapsed Time Is the Field Everyone Underestimates
Total Time as a calculated field — time end minus time start — looks like administrative overhead until you've run enough relocations to start seeing what the duration data actually contains.
Longer processing times correlate with animal stress indicators. When an event that typically runs 22 minutes takes 47 because the animal was difficult to process, that duration flag in the record is a prompt to review the notes field for any observations made during processing. It's also a variable you can analyze against post-release detection rates if you're running a telemetry follow-up.
The observer and guest fields separate professional accountability from educational participation. Guests on a relocation event are often stakeholders — landowners, regulators, funders — whose presence matters for program continuity but who shouldn't be listed with the same weight as the biologists responsible for the protocol. Keeping them in a separate field means your personnel records stay clean while the social record of who witnessed the event is preserved.
Site relocation as a free-text field rather than a dropdown is the right call for field work. Release sites change, access conditions change, and the nuance of "200m upstream from the culvert on the east side, away from the trail camera" doesn't fit a predefined list.