AMERICAN AVOCETS AT COOKING LAKE, ALBERTA, 2009–2023, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO LARGE AGGREGATION SIZE, LOW REPRODUCTION RATE, LATE MIGRATION DEPARTURE, AND EFFECTIVE PREDATOR AVOIDANCE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The American Avocet (Recurvirostra americana) is a striking black-and-white shorebird that occurs seasonally in southern Canada from British Columbia to western Ontario. Its northern limit in Alberta is near the latitude of Edmonton, and its typical preferred habitat is lakes similar to Beaverhills Lake, a Ramsar wetland 60 km east of Edmonton. In 2009, after 45 y of field studies of shorebirds and their avian predators at Beaverhills Lake, I switched study locations to Cooking Lake. From 2009 to 2023, I walked a seasonal bird survey along a 3–5-km section of Cooking Lake shores. The spring arrival of Avocets coincided with the first open water, and they stayed at the lake until late October, 3–4 wk after the latest date recorded in provincial handbooks. Avocet reproduction at Cooking Lake was presumed to be limited by the scarcity of island nesting habitat. Non-nesting aggregations were estimated at a maximum of 6000 birds. Foraging and roosting flocks were monitored for interactions with raptors, but in 60 y of walking the shores of both Alberta lakes, I have never seen an avian raptor seize an Avocet, nor did I find any plucked remains of Avocets.
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 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
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".