Diminishing avoidance over time of nest cavities containing feathers by passerine birds
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Secondary cavity nesting birds often investigate unfamiliar, dark holes while prospecting for a nest site. Such cavities may be dangerous to enter if there is a concealed predator or other occupant inside or if a predator returns to the cavity. Previous experiments on passerine birds showed that fear of entering unexplored cavities by prospecting birds was triggered by a few light-coloured feathers in the cavity which may act as cues of predation. Decorating the nest with feathers may thus reduce the risk of nest usurpation and egg dumping. We tested whether this fear of feathers also deters breeding by letting prospecting pairs of blue tits Cyanistes caeruleus and pied flycatchers Ficedula hypoleuca choose between a dyad of nest boxes which were similar in size and interior colour, but where only one nest box contained three white hen feathers and the other nest box served as a control. As many as 40% ( ) of the pairs chose the box with feathers, suggesting that most of the fear of feathers diminishes soon after the cavity is first entered. Features of the nest box (size and internal colour) did not seem to affect the strength of avoidance of the feathers. The degree of avoidance was similar in the two species, and most pairs of both species removed feathers from the nest box if they eventually used it for nesting.
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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) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.002 | 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 it