Snowy Owls in central North America have regular migration and high philopatry to wintering sites though not always to home ranges
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding the threats faced by a bird species requires a knowledge of their movements throughout the annual cycle and, for migratory species, the degree of connectivity between breeding and wintering sites. We studied the philopatry of Snowy Owls (Bubo scandiacus) tagged in central North America to their wintering sites on the Canadian prairies. The tracking of 16 owls over a period spanning six winters revealed consistent and predictable north-south migration trajectories, in contrast to populations farther to the west and east. Individuals were strongly philopatric to the central prairie region, but at a finer spatial scale, winter home ranges did not always overlap between successive years. Both sexes showed periods of nomadic searching for prey over a similar spatial scale, but males tended to settle closer to previous home ranges on average (88 km) than females (149 km). We hypothesize that the socially dominant females are better able to monopolize the spatially unpredictable hotspots of small mammal prey whereas males rely more on familiarity with a previous home range when settling. The population of Snowy Owls in central North America thus shows greater connectivity to wintering sites than do Snowy Owls documented elsewhere, probably related to the relatively high abundance and predictability of small mammal prey on the prairies. Maintaining prairie habitat on a large spatial scale that supports small rodents will be crucial to maintaining populations of Snowy Owls in the central part of the continent.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 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".