The Role of Development, Parental Behavior, and Nestmate Competition in Fledging of Nestling Tree Swallows
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Fledging (i.e. leaving the nest) in altricial birds is a major step toward independence. The timing of this important event may be influenced by nestling development, parental behavior, and sibling interactions. In this study, we examine the effect of these factors on fledging in Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor). Wing length explained a significant proportion of the variance in fledging age across broods. Similarly, within broods, longer-winged nestlings fledged before shorter-winged nestlings. Feeding rate per nestling did not decrease in the period leading up to fledging, as might be expected if parents stimulated fledging by decreasing their feeding rate. Parental activity near the nest varied in that the frequency of parental passes and hovers within 1 m of the nest opening increased in the period before fledging. Brood size also explained a significant proportion of the variance in fledging age independent of wing length, although the direction of the relationship was not consistent across years. Finally, longer-winged nestlings spent more time in the nest opening and initiated fledging of the brood more often than did shorter-winged nestlings. Overall, our study suggests that nestling development is the most important determinant of fledging age in this species. Once a critical wing length has been reached, sibling interactions, and possibly parental behavior, may influence the timing of fledging.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".