One Difficulty in Measuring the Nesting Success of Birds Is

Essay

One difficulty in measuring the nesting success of birds is that the researchers must count the eggs in the nest, which is disturbing to the parents. Even though the researcher does not harm the birds, the flight of the bird might alert predators to the presence of a nest. To see if researcher activity might degrade nesting success, the nest survival of 102 nests that had their eggs counted, was recorded. Sixty-four of the nests failed (i.e. the parent abandoned the nest).
a) Construct and interpret a 95% confidence interval for the proportion of nest failures in the population.
b) The "normal" nest failure rate of these birds is 29%. Based on the confidence interval from part (a), do you think that the researcher's activity affects nesting success? Justify your answer with an appropriate statistical argument.