Last winter I began keeping track of individuals in a population by creating detailed drawings from photographs I've taken. So far I've only worked with birds. The first two I drew were a Blue Jay and a male Evening Grosbeak. I referred to the jay as Jazz and the grosbeak as Eridin. I refuse to number animals- ignoring the anthropomorphic reasons it just makes it much more difficult to remember an individual. Besides, Jane Goodall named her chimps so I have few qualms about doing the same. One method I'm trying to use however, is to keep all of the individuals of the same species named with the same first letter which is chosen from the first letter of their common or scientific name. Blue jays are named with 'J', Evening Grosbeaks 'E',
Catbirds 'Ca', Barn Swallows 'Ba', etc... Hopefully I'll learn to recognize these individuals without having to refer to photographs.
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