Flexibility in the diel migratory schedule of an Arctic songbird despite robust 24‐h activity rhythms across the annual cycle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many birds schedule their activity to a specific phase of the diel (24‐h) light–dark cycle. Two notable exceptions are the nocturnal migration of many otherwise diurnal songbirds and the diverse activity patterns of birds during the continuous light above the Polar Circles during summer. Assumptions about the phase relationship between migratory activity and the diel cycle can be incorrect, and the diel activity of Arctic migratory birds during the year is largely unknown. We used the snow bunting Plectrophenax nivalis to investigate whether breeding songbirds above the northern Polar (Arctic) Circle have 24‐h activity rhythms with distinct active and inactive phases across the annual cycle, and whether their migration aligns with a specific phase of their activity rhythm. We found that male snow buntings maintain a robust 24‐h activity rhythm with distinct active and inactive phases across most of the annual cycle, including during polar summer, but the robust 24‐h periodicity attenuated during vernal migration. Birds scheduled long and short flights across their diel activity rhythm. However, shorter flights most often began during the active phase, and the longest flights most often began during the transition between the active and inactive phase of the diel activity rhythm. This indicates that snow buntings can flexibly schedule their flights across their prominent diel activity rhythm, although their longest flights during migration typically overlapped with their normal inactive phase, probably corresponding to nighttime. Several open questions, however, remain about the generality of our results for other songbirds, such as: what is the phase relationship between the diel activity rhythm and flight to the diel light–dark cycle, and how do historical accounts of diel migration phase align with empirical activity data for other species?
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 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".