Hello,
I have read through Chapter 17 in the Gentle Introduction book and have run a few nest survival analyses in MARK recent months but now that I'm about to run my full nest survival analysis I'm combing back through my dataset and have a couple of specific questions about the encounter history dates specifically. I keep coming back to the idea that the DSR is calculated based on the typical incubation period for your species (i.e. when you raise your DSR to the power of the # of incubation days), and so I'm worried that if my encounter histories span too long of a period, the calculations will be incorrect or less accurate?
1) "Day of the nesting season on which the nest was found"
In the species I'm studying, the bird lays one egg per day and then begins incubating full time after the last egg was laid, but I commonly found nests that were still being laid, i.e first I saw one egg, then two, etc. I am only interested in that period of incubation after the last egg has been laid, so do I need to adjust my "find" dates for the nests that I found during laying, to the day that the last egg was laid?
2) "The last day the nest was checked when alive"
3) "The last day the nest was checked"
This seems straightforward enough, but I have some nests that were eventually abandoned by adults after the eggs failed to hatched (i.e. main incubation period is 19-24 days) where the adult was actively incubating the eggs for 26-42 total days, or 2-18 extra days past when the nest should have hatched. For these nests, should I adjust the encounter histories 2&3 so that they do not extend past the 24 maximum days of incubation, under the assumption that the eggs themselves were likely no longer "active or alive" past 24 days, even though the adult was actively incubating.?
Thank you so much for your help!