Survival of fallen and returned rooftop nesting Least Tern chicks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beach habitat is increasingly degraded and disturbed, and many species of Larids (gulls, terns, and skimmers) have adapted to nesting on gravel rooftops. In the southeastern United States, the most common rooftop nester is the Least Tern (Sternula antillarum), and rooftop tern colonies are generally as productive as beach colonies. One problem with rooftop nesting is that chicks often fall from the roofs and will likely die if not rescued. Fallen chicks can be taken to wildlife rehabilitators and if they survive, be released on their own, but they will not receive the substantial pre- and post-fledgling parental care that Least Tern parents provide. We explored the success of placing chicks back on rooftops until they fledge and are able to travel to a staging beach. To determine long-term survival of these birds, from June 2011- July 2019, we uniquely banded 168 fallen Least Tern chicks in the Tampa Bay, Florida (USA) region and placed them back on the rooftops. From 2011-2022, we resighted banded birds on beaches, piers, and rooftops throughout Florida during the breeding season. We used the Cormack-Jolly-Seber model in Program Mark to estimate survival of juveniles and adults. The base model, where time was held constant for apparent survival and of both age classes and recapture rates, was the most parsimonious. We resighted 50 out of the 167 banded adult Least Terns a total of 347 times from 2012-2021. Apparent survival for fallen juvenile Least Terns was 0.387 ± 0.049 and 0.819 ± 0.032 for adult terns. There are no other studies of survival for juvenile Least Terns, but a closely related species had a slightly higher apparent survival. Adult survival in our study was comparable to that found in other similar Least Tern studies. This indicates that putting fallen Least Tern chicks back onto rooftops is a sound management strategy and should be explored for other species of seabirds.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".