Evening locomotor activity during stopover differs on pre‐departure and departure days in free‐living songbirds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The length of time songbirds remain at a migratory stopover site is likely regulated by a daily stay/go decision informed by fat stores and weather conditions, but the finer‐scale timing of this decision and associated pre‐departure behaviours are still poorly understood. Using automated radiotelemetry of free‐living songbirds captured at a migratory stopover site in spring, we tested whether individuals change their locomotor activity near sunset on their migratory departure day compared to their non‐departure days. To do so, we extracted precise transition times between diurnal activity and nocturnal inactivity, which always precedes departure, using changepoint analysis of radio transmission signal strength. Among four warbler species, individuals extended diurnal activity by 8–19 min towards sunset on their departure day. In three species, this extension was significant. In contrast, white‐throated sparrows significantly shortened diurnal activity on their departure day by 13 min, also towards sunset. This is the first study to detect and quantify a change in locomotor activity schedule on departure versus non‐departure days in free‐living songbirds, and is consistent with the hypothesis that birds engage in pre‐departure preparatory behaviours near sunset.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".