Night surveys of Yellow Rails, Coturnicops noveboracensis, and Virginia Rails, Rallus limicola, in Alberta using call playbacks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Night surveys of Yellow Rails, Coturnicops noveboracensis, and Virginia Rails, Rallus limicola, in Alberta using call playbacks.Canadian Field-Naturalist 116(3): 408-415.The Yellow Rail (Coturnicops noveboracensis) and Virginia Rail (Rallus limicola) are inconspicuous and apparently rare species in Alberta.Wide scale, targeted surveys have never been conducted for either species, and virtually nothing is known about their distribution, populations, or other traits in the province.We compiled historical records of Yellow and Virginia Rails and conducted nocturnal field surveys using call playback as a first step in clarifying the status of these species in the province.Sixty-two Yellow Rail and 66 Virginia Rail historical sites were collated, with the majority of records occurring in the central and south-central parts of the province.A total of 431 surveys were conducted at 404 sites between 17 May and 6 July 2000.These sites included 69.4% and 60.6% of historical sites for Yellow and Virginia rails, respectively.We encountered 42 unique Yellow Rails and 59 unique Virginia Rails during the surveys, with only 7.0% and 17.5% of visited historical sites being occupied.Fifteen new sites for Yellow Rails were found.Most notable was the presence of 21 birds on Hay Lake in northwestern Alberta, which is a 450 km extension to the known breeding range.Twentythree new sites for Virginia Rails were found.Playbacks were more effective at detecting Virginia Rails, as the number of spontaneously calling individuals was lower than was found for Yellow Rails (55.0% vs. 80.4%).Yellow Rails were most likely to be found in seasonal wetlands containing sedge, whereas Virginia Rails occupied a wide variety of semipermanent and permanent wetlands.Yellow Rails were most likely to be found when there was little or no moon, and during the middle (darkest) part of the night.Virginia Rails were found significantly more often when the moon was more than half full and relatively unobscured by clouds.The efficiency of future surveys for these species could therefore be improved by focusing efforts during periods and conditions when birds are most likely to be detected.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".