APPENDIX J: QUARRY DATAFILE

The information defining quarry susceptibility to shotgun pellet injury is held in a datafile named *.QDF. Each datafile defines a particular quarry species in a specific presentation.

The program allows the quarry to be described within the QDF datafile by up to 32 regions. Each region has both a definable protection afforded by feathers/skin, and up to 4 subsequent layers of tissues with definable characteristics.

For example, the datafile Mallard.QDF shown below relates to mallard shot from underneath with wings outspread. The general information includes a representative flying speed and the maximal protection afforded by the feathers and skin. The quarry is then described by 17 regions, each region being characterised by a line of data. Each region is assigned an area of presentation to the firer (in cm2), then some fraction of the maximal protection followed by information on each successive layer (in square brackets), and finally some text conveniently describing that region. The information relating to each layer is held within square brackets, the first layer being subcutaneous with further layers being successively deeper. The square brackets contain the associated category of injury (K = kill, F = fly, P = pelvic/lumbar, L = left leg, R = right leg, I = other injury, C = concussion), tissue density (g/cm³), tissue strength (MPa) and thickness (cm). It is only necessary to list deeper layers of tissue if they are associated with higher categories of injury, the categories being:

Injury categories:

The last layer need only be described by its category. E.g. [F].

The C = concussion category is a special case: a single layer only is used, with or without feather/skin protection. A concussive injury reverts to K or I according to the circumstances. The C category is currently appropriate to the beak only and equates to a 'kill' if the unconscious bird either drowns or can be retrieved promptly, else it constitutes an I injury.

For any given firing, the probability of kill, K, depends on the summed presented areas of category K. Similarly for the other categories of injury. The probabilistic permutations are given in Appendix K.

The QDF is written using standard ASCII text: users of the program can write their own QDF to describe other bird species in corresponding postures. The line sequence of the example QDF must be preserved, comma and square brackets for sequencing the data must be adhered to, a quote mark (') can be used for then adding comments to the ends of data lines. The file terminates with an 'END' statement.