Post-fledging survival, movement patterns, and habitat associations of Bendire's Thrashers ( Toxostoma bendirei ) in the Chihuahuan Desert
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Knowledge gaps about the basic demography of a species facing population declines impede conservation efforts. For many passerine species, the survival rate of the post-fledging stage is unknown but may directly contribute to population trajectories. Bendire’s Thrasher (Toxostoma bendirei) exhibits steep population declines in the southwestern United States, yet little is known about the basic breeding biology of this species. We examined juvenile Bendire’s Thrasher survival during the post-fledging period and movement patterns from the nest site. We attached transmitters to 25 nestlings and tracked 19 fledglings using radio-telemetry. Using the known fate survival method, we modeled fledgling weekly survival in relation to age, time, and body condition, as well as habitat characteristics recorded at tracking locations. The top ranked model indicated that weekly survival increased with age since fledging (β = 0.225, 95% CI: 0.109, 0.340), and survival was low (< 50%) during the first 10 days post-fledging. Predation pressure on fledglings was strong because they were not capable of flight for the first several days after leaving the nest. Distances moved from the nest increased with fledgling age, and in general, fledglings remained with family units (siblings and adults) on or near the breeding territory until the family unit dispersed. Further investigation into the post-fledging stage, in combination with other life cycle stages, will be critical for future conservation and population growth of Bendire’s Thrashers within the Chihuahuan Desert.
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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 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".