Large-scale supplemental feeding alters lay date and nest survival in Eastern Bluebirds but not in two species of chickadees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wild bird feeding is a popular and growing activity, with approximately half of households participating in nations including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Supplemental feeding can increase survival and reproductive success of birds (which is often a goal of supplemental feeding efforts), but it raises concerns about phenological mismatch, reduced clutch size, or increased risk of nest predation. Our objectives were to test whether access to supplemental food during the breeding season was correlated with (1) advanced egg-laying phenology, (2) increased clutch size, or (3) improved nest survival of 3 cavity-nesting species (Carolina Chickadee, Poecile carolinensis; Black-capped Chickadee, P. atricapillus; and Eastern Bluebird, Sialia sialis) at a large spatial scale (United States and Canada; 22 degrees latitude difference and 55 degrees longitude difference). We examined data from 24,528 nest attempts submitted to NestWatch from 2014–2019. For Eastern Bluebirds, birds with access to supplemental insects initiated clutches 5.83 (± 0.89 SE) days earlier than birds without access to food subsidies, while predicted nest survival was 5% greater for birds with access to supplemental insects (probability of nest success = 0.79, 95% CI = 0.77–0.81) when compared to birds without (0.74, 95% CI = 0.72–0.75). Clutch size of Eastern Bluebirds did not differ between birds with and without access to supplemental insects. For chickadees, supplemental feeding (of seeds, suet, insects, or fruit) was not correlated with phenology, clutch size, or nest survival. Our results suggest that supplemental feeding of insects can be an effective tool for increasing nest survival in Eastern Bluebirds and potentially other food-limited insectivores. However, the efficacy of supplemental feeding for improving reproductive success varies across taxa. Our results can help elucidate how wild bird feeding contributes to global phenomena such as earlier nesting, nest survival, and population change.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".