What it does
An ethogram is the list of behaviours you score when you watch an animal. This logger turns your keyboard (or the screen of a phone or tablet) into a behaviour recorder for continuous focal sampling: press a key when a behaviour starts, and the page keeps the time. When you stop, it works out the time budget (the share of the session spent in each state), the number of bouts and how long they lasted, and how often each point event happened, and it draws a timeline of the whole session. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
How to use it
- Write your ethogram, one behaviour per line: a one-letter key, the name, and state or event. For example “F, Foraging, state” or “C, Call, event”.
- Press Start. The clock runs, and a button appears for each behaviour.
- Press a behaviour’s key, or tap its button, each time it starts. Starting a state ends the state before it. Pressing the running state’s key again stops it, which is useful when the animal goes out of sight. Undo last removes the last entry if you pressed the wrong key.
- Press Stop. The results appear below. Download the log and the summary as CSV, or the report as an image, PDF or Word file.
Keys only work while the session is running and you are not typing in a box, so typing notes elsewhere is safe. Keep the tab open: the log is not stored, and reloading the page loses it.
What each part means
- States last until another state starts or you stop them: resting, foraging, grooming. Only one state runs at a time.
- Events are moments with no length: a call, a peck, a scratch. They are counted and given as a rate per minute.
- Time in a state: the share of the session covered by any state. The rest is time before your first key press or after a stop.
- Bouts: each uninterrupted run of a state. The table gives the number of bouts and their mean, median, shortest and longest length.
- Remember this ethogram on this device: off by default. When ticked, only the list of behaviours is kept in this browser for next time. Clear saved ethogram removes it.
Worked example
Press Load a made-up example to see an 11-minute session of an imaginary animal with four states and two events. It spent the most time Foraging: 334.2 s, 50.6 % of the session, in 9 bouts with a median bout of 42.4 s. Resting took 189.0 s (28.6 %) in 4 bouts, Vigilant 54.8 s (8.30 %) and Moving 62.0 s (9.39 %). The animal was out of sight for 20 s, logged as a stop, so 97 % of the session is in a state. There were 8 calls (0.727 per minute) and 9 scratches.
Tips
- Keep keys easy to reach, and test your ethogram for a minute before a real session.
- Define states so they cover everything the animal does, with an “Other” state if needed, so the time budget adds up.
- For inter-observer agreement on the same session, score it separately and compare with the reliability analysis tool.
Frequently asked questions
Can I pause? Press the running state’s key to stop it; the time with no state is reported separately and not counted in any behaviour.
Is it accurate enough? Times are recorded to a tenth of a second from the browser’s clock. Your reaction time is a bigger source of error, as with any manual recording.
Is anything stored or sent? No log is ever stored or sent. Only the ethogram list is kept, in this browser, if you tick the box.
Where the numbers come from
- Continuous (all-occurrence) recording of states and events, time budgets and bouts: Martin, P. and Bateson, P., Measuring Behaviour: An Introductory Guide (Cambridge University Press); Altmann, J. (1974), Behaviour 49: 227–267.
- Checked against an independent Python check on the page's made-up session (the running state sampled on a 1 ms grid with numpy; bouts listed directly).
Standard scientific values, such as constants, atomic weights and melting points, are facts found in every textbook; we name where ours were checked. If you are an author or publisher and want a value, a credit or a table changed or removed, tell us and we will act quickly.
Last updated 2026-11-09.