First Reported Case of Classical Polyandry in a North American Woodpecker, the Northern Flicker
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During a study of Northern Flickers (Colaptes auratus) nesting in central British Columbia, I discovered a polyandrous female attending two nests 447 m apart. The phenology at the two nests was staggered so that the female took incubation shifts and fed nestlings at both trees. Hatching success was typical but the female appeared to divide her provisioning effort between the broods. At one nest, only about 20% of visits were by the female, compared to a typical rate of 50%. Polyandrous mating benefited the female, who fledged all six nestlings in one brood and all seven in the other. The mean number of fledglings for monogamous females in this population was 5.9. Two other cases of polyandry possibly related to human disturbance are discussed. These results suggest exceptions to the idea that, in Picidae, the full contribution of both genders during incubation and brood rearing is required to fledge young.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".