DEMOGRAPHY OF BROWN-HEADED COWBIRDS AT DELTA MARSH, MANITOBA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Available estimates of demographic parameters for Brown-headed Cowbirds (Molothrus ater) vary geographically. However, few estimates are based on long-term studies of marked individuals. We conducted a mark–recapture study on the population of cowbirds at Delta Marsh, Manitoba during the 1993–1998 breeding seasons. We estimated annual survival, breeding site fidelity, and sex ratio, and compared those parameter estimates to other populations of Brown-headed Cowbirds. The Delta Marsh population had higher adult survival (male 90.1%; female 69.6%) and breeding site fidelity (males 66.9%, female 59.5%) than reported for other populations, and the sex ratio was significantly different from unity (1.9 males:1 female). We suggest that differences in survival and breeding-site fidelity between the Delta Marsh population and others may be due to differences in methods used to calculate parameter estimates. In contrast, variation in sex ratios is likely real and due to differences in the local ecological conditions. In our population, high survivorship and breeding-site fidelity may lead to low recruitment of new birds into the resident population and intense competition for limited breeding opportunities. The highly male biased sex ratio may result in strong sexual-selection pressure on males competing for the limited breeding opportunities. Those circumstances have implications for the social behavior and mating system of cowbirds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".