Molt, Plumage, Body Mass, and Morphometrics of a Population of the White-throated Swift in Southern California
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over a 10-year period, I examined molt patterns, plumage, and body-mass changes in a population of White-throated Swifts in the Mecca Hills, Riverside County, California, by sampling birds at regular roosts in each month from February through November.The swifts used the roosts year round but numbers at them declined in March then increased in June and July, after breeding.As a result of plumage wear, the juvenal plumage can be categorized in three "phases": prior to fiedging, after fledging, and prior to the first prebasic molt.I found no sexual dimorphism in wingspan, wing length, tarsus length, tail length, culmen length, or body mass.I found an average difference between the sexes in the depth of the tail fork, but because of much overlap it cannot be used to determine the sex of individuals.The maximum difference between highest and lowest body mass was 28.7%, less than reported for other species.Testis size began to increase in March, reaching a peak in April.Primary molt lasted 6-7 months, from May through November.Tail molt lasted about 2.5-3 months, from June through August.Breeding began at this desert site one to two months earlier than at a coastal site.The overlap of breeding and molt in this desert population appears to be less than reported for other species of swifts.The White-throated Swift (Aeronautes saxatalis) is a medium-sized swift widely distributed in North America, from British Columbia, Canada, south through mountainous terrain to Honduras (AOU 1998).It is the most common and only resident swift in southern California (Garrett and Dunn 1981, Unitt 1984).Despite the species' wide distribution, most of what is known about the White-throated Swift is distribution and taxonomy (Bent 1940, Behle 1973, Navarro et al. 1991, Ryan and Collins 2000), breeding sites (Bradbury 1918, Pitelka 1943, Dobkin et al. 1986), and physiology (Bartholomew et al. 1957).The goal of this study was to describe the patterns of molt and variation in body mass in a single population of White-throated Swifts over an annual cycle.STUDY AREA AND METHODS From 1990 through 2000, I collected 112 specimens of the Whitethroated Swift from a single large roost in Painted Canyon, Riverside Co., California (33 ø 30' N, 116 ø 00 w W; elevation 125 m).The roost was a crack in a large boulder about 15-18 m above the ground and located in a sandy cliff about 60-80 m in height, along a desert wash in the Mecca Hills.I collected a minimum of ten adult specimens per month from February through November.Most specimens were collected within the middle third of each month and are deposited at the Natural History Museum of Los 216 Western Birds 34:216-224, 2003
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".