The Big Boom Theory: The Common Nighthawk wing-boom display delineates exclusive nesting territories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Understanding the functional significance of bird sounds can provide valuable insight into the behavior and how birds use habitat. We show that the Common Nighthawk (Chordeiles minor) wing-boom display is a territorial signal associated with the nest location that can be used to identify territorial habitat use. In other words, the Common Nighthawk wing-boom display can be considered analogous to song due to its potential function in territoriality. We captured, tagged, and tracked 21 male Common Nighthawks in northeastern Alberta to confirm the functional significance of the wing-boom display and describe Common Nighthawk territoriality. Mean wing-boom use density (hereafter “area”) size was 10.2 ha (SD = 11.7 ha). We found minimal overlap in the wing-boom area (5 of 15 neighboring male pairs, 0.2–4.5% overlap), suggesting the wing-boom display represents an exclusive territory. Comparison of wing-boom locations and random points within the wing-boom area confirmed that male Common Nighthawks select areas near the nest to perform wing-boom displays. There was high wing-boom area overlap for the same individual between years. Differences between years reflected shifts in nest location, suggesting that the wing-boom display is a good indicator of the nest location and territory. Future Common Nighthawk surveys should record the type of acoustic signal observed to differentiate territorial habitat use from other functions. Many taxa that produce non-vocal sounds as part of breeding displays could similarly benefit from a functional understanding to provide insight into habitat use.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".