Predation by Great Black-backed Gulls on Banded Waterfowl
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the winter waterfowl banding seasons in 1980, 1982, 1983, 1985, and 1986 on Seneca Lake in central New York State, two Great Black-backed Gulls (Lares marinus) have attacked and killed newly banded and released waterfowl.Their predatory behavior is systematic and largely unvarying.The Great Black-backed Gull has extended its winter range in the last few decades to include the eastern Great Lakes where their numbers have been steadily increasing (Peakall 1967, Bull 1974).During this period, a small number of individuals has regularly appeared during the winter at the northern end of Seneca Lake, one of the large Finger Lakes in central New York State, 46 km south of Lake Ontario (Peakall 1967).The Great Black-backed Gull has been described by Audubon as "...the tyrant of sea-fowl...", and by Nuttall as "...a particular enemy of the graceful eider, pouncing upon and devouring its young on every occasion, and often kills considerablesized ducks" (Nuttall 1834: 309).Studies of the food habits of the Great Black-backed Gull have been done by Harris (1965) on islands off the coast of Wales, Hunt and Hunt (1973) in Maine and Northwestern Europe, Threlfall (1968) in Newfoundland, Koch (1974) in Helgoland in the North Sea, and Ingolfsson (1976) in Iceland.They clearly demonstrated that this species is a generalized forager, an opportunistic omnivore like other large gulls, but a greater scavenger and predator.Several observers have published accounts of Great Blackbacked Gulls attacking and killing adult birds including waterfowl (Kuerzi 1937, Addy 1945, Gross 1945, Cobb 1957, Mansueti 1961, Presnal11968, Andersson and Fridzen 1970, Svensson 1971, Halliday 1977); other Great Black-backed Gulls (Corkhill 1971); migrating passetines (MacDonald and Mason 1973); Atlantic Puffins (Fratercula arcrice) and Manx Shearwaters (Puffinuspuffinus) (Robinson 1930, Harris 1965); and a Horned Grebe (Podiceps auritus) (Waltevens 1985).METHODS Everywinter for over thirtyyears I have operated a waterfowl banding station during the months of January, February and March at Kashong Bay on the west shore of Seneca Lake, 11 km south of the city of Geneva which is at the northern.end
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".