Tier 1 Is Where the Individual Animals Live
Tier 2 monitoring tells you what's happening at a population level — how many nests are active, how many eggs are in the ground, how breeding success looks across the season. Tier 1 goes deeper. It tracks the identity of the specific birds at each nest, the weight of each individual chick at every visit, the head length measurements that tell you whether a chick's growth curve is tracking properly, and the precise nature of every human-animal interaction.
The Nest Checks (PAT1) template is the field instrument for that level of monitoring. It's built for programs where the individual birds are known, banded or PIT-tagged, and where their reproductive histories are being tracked across multiple breeding seasons. At this resolution, the database is no longer just a record of what happened — it's a longitudinal study.
What the Interaction Field Actually Captures
Most nest check templates log presence and counts. This one logs what the observer actually did during the visit, via the Interaction field.
Thirteen options span the full range: Passive (default — you observed without disturbing), Band read passive, Band read handled, Transponder scanned, Marking, Measurements, Device deployment, Device recovery, Tissue sample, Uplifted, Released, Medical treatment. The distinction between Band read passive and Band read handled matters for welfare monitoring — handled interactions are physical contacts that carry stress costs, and their frequency per bird needs to be tracked. If a particular nest is being disturbed more often than protocol allows, the Interaction log surfaces that.
Uplifted means the bird was removed from the site — typically for veterinary care or relocation. Released means it was returned. When these appear as a pair on a bird record, you have the full capture-and-release history. Medical treatment is its own category because it triggers different notification requirements under New Zealand wildlife management permits.
The Site field is a named location list covering the specific monitored sites in this program — Breakwater Bay, Tommy Island, Groper Island, Goat Island, Crayfish Island, Rollers Beach, Pigeon House East. Hardcoded, not free text. Same rationale as the deployment template: consistency across seasons and observers.
Individual Identity at the Nest
Adult 1 and Adult 2 are relational entry fields linked to the Bird ID library — the same library used by the deployment template. Every bird in the study has a unique record. When the nest check logs Adult 1 as a specific entry, that record carries the bird's band number, PIT tag number, sex, and entire contact history. The nest check record doesn't repeat any of that information — it simply points to it.
This means you can query in either direction: all nest check records for a specific bird, or all birds that appeared at a specific nest across a season. A pair bond that dissolves between seasons — one adult returning, one replaced — is immediately visible in the Adult 1 and Adult 2 fields as a change in the linked entries between years.
Chick 1 and Chick 2 each get their own section: a status field (Alive, Dead, Fledged, Unknown, or blank default), a weight in grams, a head length in millimeters, and a link to the Bird ID library for when the chick has been banded and enters the system as an individual. Before banding, the chick entry field remains empty. After banding, the record links the chick's own Bird ID entry to every subsequent nest check where it was observed.
Weight and head length together give you a growth curve. A chick that was 340 g at day 10 and 290 g at day 14 is losing mass during a period when it should be gaining. That's a flag for food stress — possibly linked to adult foraging difficulty, possibly linked to inter-sibling competition if Chick 2 is heavier at the same timepoints.
The Same Automation, More Context
The JavaScript automation running on create and edit events is identical to the Tier 2 template: if Status is Not breeding, Fledged, or Failed, Eggs and Chicks are set to 0; if Status is Unknown, both are set to Unknown; two chicks means zero eggs, two eggs means zero chicks. The logic doesn't change between tiers.
What does change is what surrounds it. At Tier 1, the zero-egg, zero-chick record for a Failed nest also carries the last known adult identities, the last recorded chick weights, and the interaction history up to the failure event. The automation enforces data integrity on the counts; the relational structure preserves everything else.