Mass gain and stopover dynamics among migrating songbirds are linked to seasonal, environmental, and life-history effects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract During migration, birds must stopover at refueling sites to replenish energy stores, with the rate of refueling linked to stopover length, migration speed, and the timing of critical life stages, such as breeding. Under optimal migration theory, birds are expected to maximize fuel intake and minimize stopover length (the time minimization hypothesis). Within a multi-species framework, we demonstrate that time minimization behavior is context-dependent, as refueling rate, stopover length, and departure decisions vary between seasons, among species with different ecological traits (e.g., diet and migration distance), and in response to density-dependent factors and prevailing environmental conditions. Using long-term banding data (10 years) from southwestern British Columbia, Canada, we investigated the ecological processes shaping stopover dynamics among 5 warbler (Parulidae) and 5 sparrow species (Passerellidae). Specifically, we assessed variation in fuel deposition rates (FDRs) as well as the associations between mass gain, stopover length, and departure probability. FDR was greater in insectivorous warblers during spring migration and in species migrating long distances. FDR responded positively to temperature and habitat productivity, but negatively to precipitation events, particularly for insectivorous, long-distance migrants during spring migration. Similarly, density-dependent refueling rate was only observed in insectivores and long-distance migrants during spring migration, where higher densities of foliage-gleaning insectivores were associated with a lower FDR. Stopover duration was more closely associated with body condition upon arrival and subsequent mass gain than direct environmental effects, especially during northward spring migration, providing support for time minimization and a mass threshold influencing departure decisions. These results highlight that refueling rates and stopover quality vary among species depending on their life-history strategies, with particular implications for long-distance, migratory insectivores, which may be most susceptible to climate shifts.
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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) | 0.002 | 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".