Waterfowl facility

The facility

This is a facility for keeping waterfowl for behavioural and physiological research. The facility consists of an outdoor aviary and a building for birds indoors.

The outdoor aviary consists of a frame of a tunnel (52 x 10 m), covered by netting, with an artificial ditch (42 x 3 m) with water flow made of a wooden base. The area within the tunnel is subdivided in eight compartments that can be easily joined by removing the fences over the ditch. Next to the tunnel is a fenced field (27 x 27 m).

The adjacent building consists of five rooms, including two storage rooms and a kitchen room, an experimental room (10 x 5 m), and a large room (13 x 14 m) with three 1 m deep basins (3 x 6 m) that can be used to house birds indoors (for experiments but also, for instance, in case of emergency, the so-called 'ophokplicht').

Species groups studied

Birds 

Running period (guaranteed funding)

2011 – Undetermined

Equipment / facilities

• In outdoor aviary: animal weighing scale (Maas, range 30 kg, resolution 10 g) with sluice (1,0 x 0,5 x 0,9 m) in outdoor aviary.
• In building: respirometer (Sable Systems) with multiplexer to measure 4 birds simultaneously.

Data management  

Any handling of animals is registered in BAS  

Available datasets

None 

Conditions for access 

Access is limited, always after consultation with contact person.