Chapter 3 Animal Home Ranges and Territories and Home Range Estimators Most animals are not nomadic but live in fairly confined areas where they enact their day-to-day activities. Such areas are called home ranges. Burt provided the verbal definition of a mammal’s home range that is the foundation of the general concept used today. | Chapter 3 Animal Home Ranges and Territories and Home Range Estimators Roger A. Powell Definition of Home Range Most animals are not nomadic but live in fairly confined areas where they enact their day-to-day activities. Such areas are called home ranges. Burt 1943 351 provided the verbal definition of a mammal s home range that is the foundation of the general concept used today that area traversed by the individual in its normal activities of food gathering mating and caring for young. Occasional sallies outside the area perhaps exploratory in nature should not be considered part of the home range. This definition is clear conceptually but it is vague on points that are important to quantifying animals home ranges. Burt gave no guidance concerning how to quantify occasional sallies or how to define the area from which the sallies are made. The vague wording implicitly and correctly allows a home range to include areas used in diverse ways for diverse behaviors. Members of two different species may use their home ranges very differently with very different behaviors but for both the home ranges are recognizable as home ranges not something different for each species. How does an animal view its home range Obviously with our present knowledge we cannot know but to be able to know would provide tremendous insight into animals lives. Aldo Leopold 1949 78 wrote The wild things that live on my farm are reluctant to tell me in so many words how much of my township is included within their daily or nightly beats. I am curious about this for it gives me the ratio between the size of their universe and mine and it conveniently begs the much more important question who is the more thoroughly acquainted with the world in which he lives Leopold con 66 ROGER A. POWELL tinued Like people my animals frequently disclose by their actions what they decline to divulge in words. We do know that members of some species probably many species have cognitive maps of where they live .
