The Question Nobody Asked Until They Had a Rooster
Published research in Current Biology (Shimmura & Yoshimura, 2013) established that roosters crow before dawn primarily in response to an endogenous circadian clock — not environmental light cues. The crow happens reliably before sunrise even in constant light or constant dark conditions. What the paper couldn't fully answer is whether this internal clock behaves the same at 52° north latitude — where summer nights barely exist and winter days barely start — as it does at lower latitudes with more predictable photoperiods.
The person who built this template has roosters and a neighbour problem. They also have a legitimate scientific question: does the predawn crowing interval shift seasonally at northern latitudes the way it does closer to the equator? Does it compress during the midsummer weeks when astronomical night is only two hours long? Is the internal clock entrained to the light cycle or truly independent?
Collecting that data for a year requires this form.
Crow-Time and Sunrise: The Measurement That Matters
The single most important data pair in the template is Crow-Time and Sunrise recorded on the same entry for the same date. The delta between them — how many minutes before sunrise the rooster crowed — is the measurement the research question turns on.
At the same latitude across a year, that delta should be roughly consistent if the circadian clock is truly endogenous. If the delta compresses in summer and expands in winter, the clock is responding to photoperiod. If it stays constant through the solstice extremes, it's behaving as a true internal oscillator independent of day length. One year of daily entries — 365 records with exact Crow-Time and Sunrise timestamps — makes this question answerable.
Session Count and the Three-Session Phenomenon
Crowsession records whether the morning had one, two, or three predawn crowing sessions. The third option is labeled "3 vroeg session" — "vroeg" being Dutch for early — a language artifact that tells you this template was built in the Netherlands and tested on Dutch roosters, which apparently also crow in two or three distinct bursts rather than continuously.
The session structure is itself a research variable. Does the rooster always produce two sessions, or does session count vary with season, age, weather, or competitive pressure from other roosters? Session duration in minutes, recorded alongside session count, gives the total dawn crowing time per day — the data that determines whether keeping a rooster becomes a neighbour management problem.
Age matters because younger roosters crow more frequently and start earlier — the testosterone hypothesis noted in the field hint. What breed also matters because crowing frequency and timing vary significantly between bantam and large-breed roosters, and between heritage breeds and commercial hybrids. Both fields are free text because the researcher is working with their own specific birds and knows their names and breeds better than any dropdown could capture.
Location, Weather, and the Cross-Latitude Project
Location as a GPS pin lets other users submit data from their own locations. The template was designed to be shared — the description explicitly invites users at high latitudes (northern Scandinavia, Alaska, Iceland) to contribute data to answer whether the circadian clock works differently "up north." GPS location combined with sunrise time allows anyone reviewing the aggregated dataset to calculate the latitude-photoperiod relationship automatically.
Weather on the same date as the crowing session records whether overcast conditions, rain, or clear skies affect crowing time or session count. If weather correlates with timing, it suggests some light-entrainment influence is operating alongside the internal clock — or simply that roosters are less loud when it's wet and the researcher slept through the first session.