Hanging out in the outback: the use of social hotspots by wild zebra finches

The social and spatial organisation of avian societies is often complex and dynamic with individuals socialising with others in a local population. Although social interactions can readily be described in colonial breeders through the location of nests, social interactions regularly take place in other contexts that are often not considered. Social behaviour in the colonially breeding zebra finch, Taeniopygia guttata, has been the focus of much work in the laboratory, but very little is known about their social organisation in free-living populations, especially outside the breeding context. Here we characterise semi-permanent gathering locations, or ‘social hotspots’ in the zebra finch in the wild. We determined the use of such social hotspots and the resulting group dynamics by quantifying movements to and from these locations through direct observation and by quantifying the vocal activity at these locations using acoustic recorders. We show that, throughout the day, zebra finches re..., This dataset collection describes data from three different methods that we combined in order to describe the presence and usage of social hotspots in wild zebra finches. These hotspots are temporally stable locations, either in bushes or (shrub-like) trees, where zebra finches come and go, and spend substantial time. Hangouts, periods of time when the hotspot is occupied, regularly take place at these meeting locations. The data was collected from October–December 2019 at UNSW Fowlers Gap Arid Zone Research Station in New South Wales, Australia, home to a well-studied population of wild zebra finches. The three methods are:a) Dropping countsWe counted zebra finch droppings under bushes/trees in 10x10 cm squares in order to identify and/or confirm which vegetation was substantially used by zebra finches. For each site we identified also a 'control tree' which was nearby and similar, but where we observed a lower amount of droppings. These 'social tree' – 'control tree' pairs were then u..., We included a README file that contains descriptions of all variables in all files that are part of this dataset collection here on Dryad, and also of the software elements (R and python code) that are uploaded to Zenodo. The readme also describes which files are the raw datasets, which are the processed ones, and which are the files to process raw into processed files.