Insights from a decade of using the Motus network to track boreal bird species from Observatoire d’oiseaux de Tadoussac, Québec to temperate and tropical wintering grounds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Migration is the least-studied phase of the life cycle for many bird species, despite its importance to the full understanding of their life history traits and conservation. Between 2014 and 2023, we deployed tracking devices at Observatoire d’oiseaux de Tadoussac, Québec and used the Motus Wildlife Tracking System to investigate migration patterns of 10 species that breed in boreal and Arctic habitats of eastern Canada, and migrate to wintering areas in the United States and South America. Several species were of special conservation concern in the United States and Canada. Motus receiving stations from Québec to Colombia provided migratory movements for over 350 individual birds. We present and discuss tracking duration and distances, migration routes, stopover, flight statistics, and phenology of fall migration for these species. The array of Motus receivers in the region surrounding the tagging site detected many individuals clearly upon departure, allowing for comparisons of post-capture stopover duration and departure strategy. All tagged species stopped over at the tagging location following capture (mean 8.2 days ± 6.7 SD), which could have been an effect of the capture and tagging process. Short distance migrants (mean 10.6 days ± 7.6 SD) stopped over longer than long-distance migrants (mean 5.3 days ± 3.8 SD). Prolonged (> 7 days) stopovers were detected elsewhere along the migratory routes for six of the species tagged. Eight species were detected during long-distance (> 100 km) migratory flights and estimated flight speeds were similar across species (mean 53.5 km/h ± 22.3 SD). All but one species made primarily nocturnal departures for migratory flights, and three of the species with nocturnal departures were previously thought to be diurnal migrants. The Motus network allowed a reliable method to assess and compare migratory routes and timing for a variety of small birds nesting in Arctic and boreal ecosystems.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".