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Thank you for the revised manuscript. I have reviewed the paper and am happy that that the remaining comments have all been addressed and the manuscript is now ready for publication.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Jennifer Vonk, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
Thank you for carefully considering the Reviewers' comments and making amendments to improve the manuscript. There is just one outstanding comment that was perhaps misunderstood and has yet to be fully addressed before the article can be accepted for publication. I explain below how this comment can be resolved.
Review 1, Comment 3: The ethogram is still not repeatable. The mechanics of the behaviour need to be described in full so that others can follow.
Authors' Reply: Thanks for the thoughtful comments about the ethogram. We have updated the ethogram to incorporate explanations of each behavior and the details about how to calculate the frequency and duration of each behavior. We think these modifications give a more precise and thorough explanation of every action, making it easier for other researchers to replicate the findings (Please see table 1)
My Response: Regarding the ‘mechanics’ of behaviour, the Reviewer was asking for specific details and body movements here. Please remove the newly added ‘Measurement details’ column and add more detail to the Description. This kind of detail is not given in the references you have cited but it is good practice to be clear about exactly what behaviour has been recorded and ensure the descriptions are mutually exclusive.
For example, for Feeding behaviour, what do you mean by ‘picking’? Is this pecking behaviour and does it include looking at food with head upright or only when head is lowered? Did it include picking or pecking at the ground, or only picking (pecking?) in a feeding trough or bowl? Did it include all pecking behaviour – in which case this would include pecking at conspecifics.
For Hiding behaviour, did this include individuals when they were both stationary and moving in the bushes, or only stationary in the bushes and moving towards bushes? Similarly, ‘staying away from the visitor/observer area’ is vague – this could mean performing another activity away from the observer area. If birds were alarmed, what behaviour or body position indicated this to the observer? (Behavioural descriptions that include subjects ‘perceiving’ a stimulus or a subjects’ goal are very difficult to determine and should be avoided).
For Moving, did this include walking with both head upright and head lowered? And did it exclude wing flapping, jumping and flying?
There are also a few minor typos that should be resolved:
Line numbers refer to the track changes document.
Line 64 Please add the word species, “ …beautiful look of many species”
Line 270 Please add the word the “enclosures available at the pheasantry..” (and the same in line 292)
Many thanks for your careful consideration of the reviewers' comments and your amendments which have greatly improved the manuscript.
However, both reviewers have highlighted minor outstanding amendments which need addressing before the manuscript can be accepted for publication. I would be grateful if you could address all of these.
I am happy with the amendments made to this paper and feel that it is a useful one for those wishing to know more about the visitor effect on birds.
I have a few minor comments.
Please remember that data are plural. These data rather than the data. Data were rather than data was. Please check throughout the manuscript.
A photo or diagram of the aviaries would be useful.
The ethogram is still not repeatable. The mechanics of the behaviour need to be described in full so that others can follow.
The new modelling is useful. Please provide some information on how model fit was judged. Did you look at AIC values or r2 values?
I think you need to make a comment in the discussion about the naturalness of these enclosures, and whether the social structure of each species matched what would be seen in the wild. Do you think that differences between the housing and husbandry of these birds has an impact on how they respond to visitors than if they were in large, naturalistic enclosures?
Please see comments above.
Please see comments above.
Please see comments above.
Please review the sources cited on lines 66, Bruni et al., 2007 and Kredens & Vogt 2023. These are not relevant to your statement, for one if referring to wild tourism.
Please review the source for line 96 pertaining to animal behavior being used to evaluate zoo animal welfare. There are plenty of recent sources to support this statement. Please adjust to use current and recent sources, such as Binding et al 2020.
While you have made the study site and design more clear, it still would be useful to include a visual representation of the enclosure showing the amount of foliage used.
Please review line 124, is the food bowl arrangement easy access for keepers or for the birds?
Please consider adjusting your source on line 240, as it is not a peer reviewed source.
Thank you for adjusting the points raised previously.
Thank you for adjusting the points raised previously.
Thank you for the thorough review of the comments and clear actions taken to improve the manuscript. By demonstrating best practice with the cover letter and tracked changes, this made reviewing efficient and professional. Thank you!
Dear Authors
Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PeerJ. It has now received comments from two reviewers and I have also read through and considered the manuscript. Before we can accept it for publication, please address the major revisions that have been suggested. These will improve the clarity of the manuscript and the strength of the research.
Both reviewers agree that more research on non-mammalian and/or relatively common species is much needed and a study of visitor effects on pheasants is welcome. However, reviewers and myself noted improvements are needed in the written English within the manuscript. If there are any non-native English speakers among the authors, then thank you for publishing your article in English to further disseminate your findings. (If not, then please disregard the rest of this paragraph). I'm mindful that publishing in a second language is challenging and translation services can be a costly barrier to publishing. I want to reassure the authors that any editorial decision is based purely on the quality of the science and not on the linguistic fluency in the manuscript. If useful, translatesciences.com have created a list of resources to help overcome language barriers in science https://osf.io/wqmjn
I agree with the reviewers that a more representative overview of key literature is needed and you should feel able to cite relevant research in languages other than English if you wish. The rationale in the Introduction for focusing on female pheasants is missing and it is not clear from the Methods exactly how the data were collected or analysed. This then impacts the Discussion, where it seems several conclusions cannot be justified by the results.
Additionally, please include an ethics statement in your revised manuscript. Although this is an observational study, the study needs to demonstrate compliance with housing and husbandry determined by the relevant regulatory animal welfare body for the country and in line with relevant international guidelines, for example, the International Society for Applied Ethology (5.3.2) https://www.applied-ethology.org/cgi-bin/showpage.fcgi
I hope the reviewers' detailed comments below will assist you in improving the manuscript and look forward to your resubmission.
Best wishes
**PeerJ Staff Note:** Please ensure that all review, editorial, and staff comments are addressed in a response letter and that any edits or clarifications mentioned in the letter are also inserted into the revised manuscript where appropriate.
Nicola Koyama
The premise of this paper is a useful one. We need more information on non-mammalian species respond to the managed environment of the zoo. I urge the authors to work on making this paper more robust in terms of how methods are explained, how results are presented, and how findings are interpreted.
The written English in the article needs major improvement. The authors need to check this thoroughly throughout and ensure that sentences are correctly constructed and that they make sense.
The first line of the abstract is not true. Zoo animals do not commonly change their behaviour when visitors are present. Many species display a neutral response to visitors and a burgeoning body of literature shows the visitor effect to be overestimated, which many so called visitor effects actually responses to climate or weather.
Therefore, the most important thing these authors can do is to find some weather and climate data for each hour of observation on each date of study and include this information as predictors of behaviour alongside of visitor presence and visitor time spent at the enclosure. You should also consider running some tests, such as a correlation, on whether increased visitor number shows any relation with weather/climate.
Also, you only looked at female birds but male pheasants are very attractive and engaging to visitors. So what was the male bird doing? If he was out and on show, did this draw more visitors to each enclosure?
The authors need to provide a stronger and more balanced review of the topic in their introduction and consider what papers are most suitable for their discussion.
Why were five pheasant species randomly selected? Surely the authors should have looked at the ecology of the pheasants in the Pheasantry and then decided which species to study based on those that are likely to show different responses to visitors?
Why only female birds? Your explanation that they are important for breeding does not really make sense. Male birds are also required for breeding and are also likely to be affected by visitors.
Female pheasants are more cryptically coloured and therefore you could formulate a good research question around cryptic individuals responding more to visitors that the male bird with his more showy plumage.
Please justify the data collection period. Why so short?
Please explain how you did continuous sampling? I don't see how this is possible for the behaviours that you recorded.
How were birds all recorded at the same time during this period?
The methods as they are currently written are neither replicable or repeatable. You need to provide more information on the enclosure set up for each species, how many individuals were present in the enclosure, and how behavioural data were collected for each individual bird.
You say that the camera traps were placed in the upper corner of the enclosure yet you also say that you recorded hiding and use of cover. So how could the camera record the location of the individual, and its behaviour when it was undercover? I think you need to include some images from the camera to support your description of methods.
You need to provide an ethogram that lists each behaviour (states and events) with a definition and description of that behaviour so others can follow.
Currently, you do not explain what behaviours are states and which are events and this is important because they need to be recorded and analysed differently. State behaviours can be timed and event should be counted. States will be displayed in an activity budget and events presented as a rate or frequency of occurrence.
You say you have 525hours of data, but for what? All birds in total? Each bird? How is this divided up?
Please explain where visitors come from. Is this pheasantry open to the public. You mention that is belongs to a university, so is it a research facility?
I don't understand how you recorded visitor number and the time they spent at the enclosure if you were using camera traps. Also, you say that data were recorded continuously from 10am-5pm so if this was done by hand, was a researcher stationed there for the whole time? Please clarify.
I do not understand the statistical analysis. You have repeated measures on each bird within the same population therefore your modelling needs to account for this. Either the animal needs to be the random factor or if you are looking at species differences then date needs to be random factor. You have included species at the random factor, so I don't see how you can actually test for species differences. Also, I don't understand when you say you have counted focal individuals yet you have used continuous sampling?
I am afraid that I cannot comment on the validity of the findings and their interpretation in the discussion because the lack of explanation and clarity around the methods means I do not have confidence in the results as they stand. The authors need to re-write their methods and provide better explanation of how data were collected and therefore what was analysed.
However, I think the authors needs a better grasp of the literature and review papers on birds and bird responses to captivity / visitors within their discussion to provide context, rather than include papers on other taxa that are likely to respond in a completely different way.
Some aspects of the conclusion are very discursive. Please remove the novel information and outside reading and evaluation and discuss these in the main discussion. The conclusion should simply summarise what you have found out and what its wider meaning is.
Do you have the permission from HBW to use their pheasant images as part of your figures?
All figures need interpretation. I.e. they need axes to be labelled (and with units where relevant) and they need a caption that explains what the figure shows.
I recommend you construct an average time activity budget for each pheasant species, so the reader can see how much time was spent on behaviour overall.
I also recommend that you categorise your count of visitor number in i) no visitor, ii) low visitor, iii) medium visitor, iv) high visitor presence as you might find that putting a categorical term into your model yields a better result. Perhaps look at the median number of numbers and then work out what catergories of visitor number can be created around this.
The referencing style needs to be consistent and the authors should follow the journal's format. The authors need to read more widely and consider the choice of examples used to support the study. I recommend a more thorough review of the bird literature that discusses the complexities of understanding what truly is a visitor effect. These papers might help the authors generate more grounded evidence for their research question:
https://doi.org/10.1002/zoo.21615
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2022.104763
https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2020.00236
https://www.animalbehaviorandcognition.org/uploads/journals/26/AB_C_2020_Vol7(1)_Blanchett_et_al.pdf
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2018.05.015
Please remember that data are plural. "Data were recorded..." "Data were analysed..." etc.
Your citation for RStudio needs to also be accompanied by information on what version of R is used to run it. You need to have both R and RStudio in place to use the latter. "All data were analysed in RStudio v.XXX (citation) from the R v. XXX platform (citation)."
The article was written in English and must use some clear and unambiguous text. Some aspects need to be clarified and these are highlighted in the annotated PDF. The article was conformed to professional standards of courtesy and expression.
The article should had a basic introduction and limited background to demonstrate how the work fits into the broader field of knowledge. There is a need to review the literature used as many were cited incorrectly. Furthermore, there is scope to include more recent and relevant studies and these are highlighted within the in-text feedback.
The structure of the article conformed to an acceptable format of ‘standard sections’. Figures should be relevant to the content of the article, of sufficient resolution, and appropriately described and labelled. However, there needs to be an inclusion of an ethogram and enclosure layout as to help with repeatability, All appropriate raw data was made available in accordance with our Data Sharing policy.
The submission appeared ‘self-contained’.
This fit original primary research within Aims and Scope of the journal.
The submission somewhat clearly defined the research question, which was relevant to visitor impacts. The knowledge gap being investigated was identified, and statements could be made more clear as to how the study contributes to filling that gap.
The investigation was conducted and to a standard. Namely, it was not clear as to why only females were observed. For clarity, if only females were observed this should be clear in the abstract, results and discussion. The research was conducted in conformity with the prevailing ethical standards in the field.
However, the methods were not described with sufficient information to be reproducible by another investigator. Key components were missing: such as the enclosure design, how many birds in each cage, and ethogram.
Decisions were not entirely made based on any subjective determination of impact or being of interest to only a niche audience.
The data on which the conclusions are based were provided. The data was mostly robust, but with a limited sample size and evidence of boot legging to extrapolate data.
The conclusions were almost appropriately stated, as some of the conclusions were not connected to the original question investigated (visitor perception toward zoo animals, line 227), and were not supported by the results (line 229). In particular, claims of a causative relationship should be supported by a well-controlled experimental intervention, and this was not evident by a control group. Correlation is not causation.
Thank you for your manuscript submission and researching pheasants in Pakistan. Researching behavioural impacts of visitors on zoo animals is a growing area of study, and it is great to see a study on a relatively common group of birds!
While the background and purpose of the study was clear, there are some major amendments that would need to be addressed to ensure it is repeatable and robust:
-Literature Review: Many of the references cited in the Introduction were not cited correctly. These are highlighted in the in-text feedback. Furthermore, there are more relevant and recent peer-reviewed articles which may be better suited. Therefore, it is suggested you redo your literature review to aid your study. Suggestions on various text which may be more helpful are mentioned in the feedback.
-Repeatability of study: There are aspects of the study design and framework which are not covered, such as enclosure design, individuals in each cage, ethogram, etc. Furthermore, there was no control group to measure the baseline of the pheasant behaviour without visitors, such as not during opening hours. Additionally, there are concerns that only female pheasants were observed but, in the conclusions, and title it is a sweeping statement of “pheasants”. Finally, line 114 states “15 days” however within that time provided and excluding weekends, it is actually 14 days. Please address.
-Smaller concerns include: keywords which are repeated from the title. There were some formatting errors highlighted within the text.
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