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Human impacts on water transparency may affect plunge‐diving seabirds. We studied prey capture success of Sandwich Terns Sterna sandvicensis as a function of six environmental variables during the breeding season. We observed diving terns in the south eastern North Sea and found a non‐linear optimum curve for the relationship between Secchi transparency and prey capture probability. High capture probability...
In seasonal environments with limited time and energy resources, double‐brooded birds face trade‐offs in the timing of their two reproductive attempts and in the effort allocated to the first and the second broods. In the Barn Swallow Hirundo rustica a long care period for the first brood enhances the survival of first‐brood chicks, but also delays the start of the second brood, which in turn reduces...
Little is known about the foraging ecology of invasive bird species in Europe. We used radio‐telemetry to assess home‐ranges of breeding male Ring‐necked Parakeets in Brussels. Results indicate that parakeets primarily forage in parks and gardens while avoiding forests. This can probably be explained by the higher food availability in anthropogenic habitats and fits a general pattern that invasive...
Explanations for the coexistence of migratory and sedentary (resident) birds are much debated: some authors have suggested that migrants make use of surplus resources not exploited by residents, whereas others have recorded ecological shifts in residents during periods when migrants are present. These shifts have been ascribed to the presence of migrants but could equally reflect seasonal variation...
Nest attendance behaviour in birds is a function of the careful balance between the risk of nest predation and the needs of the parents and nestlings. This attendance must be carefully regulated, as increased parental activity at the nest increases nest predation risk. We tested the long‐standing hypothesis that nest predation risk influences parental behaviour by evaluating the influence of local...
Migratory connectivity describes the extent to which different individuals from specific breeding populations use similar non‐breeding sites, with important consequences for the demography and population structure of birds. We used mark‐recapture data from the EUring data bank to describe the non‐breeding range of Twite Linaria flavirostris within Western Europe. We quantified the strength of migratory...
The increasing use of, and visits to, isolated territories by people (especially tourists) enables the investigation of how biodiversity reacts to evolutionarily novel pressures. We explored the behavioural reaction of a breeding seabird species, the Brown Noddy Anous stolidus, to our repeated visits at two study sites in the Chesterfield Islands, a newly classified reserve in the Coral Sea Natural...
Numerous animals are able to adapt to temporal patterns in natural food availability, but whether species living in relatively novel environments such as cities can adapt to anthropogenic activity cycles is less well understood. We aimed to assess the extent to which urban gulls have adapted their foraging schedule to anthropogenic food source fluctuations related to human activity by combining field...
The nestlings of many bird species have ornaments in their mouths, yet the within‐species function of these ornaments remains relatively little studied compared with adult ornaments. Here, we describe the pattern of variation in the tongue spots of Dunnock Prunella modularis nestlings and evaluate their potential influence on parental allocation. We observed that some nestlings hatch with a third...
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