Attraction to birdseed by non-target wildlife and implications for management of urban coyotes (<i>Canis latrans</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Conflicts between humans and coyotes are increasing in urban areas across North America and often stem from access to anthropogenic food. Birdseed is an abundant, but potentially underappreciated, source of anthropogenic food that may attract coyotes (Canis latrans) and their prey to residential yards. This attraction could worsen conflict with urban coyotes via food conditioning that increases aggressive behavior, reductions in body condition that increase dependency on human resources, and exposure to parasites shared by coyotes and their rodent prey, particularly Echinococcus multilocularis, an emerging zoonotic tapeworm. We explored how birdseed that is inadvertently spilled beneath feeders potentially attracts coyotes and mouse-sized rodents in 43 residential yards near urban greenspaces in Edmonton, Canada. We used a before-after control-impact (BACI) study design to test whether mammal attraction is reduced by adding seed hoops to collect spilled seed. Coyotes and rodents visited bird feeders in most yards, but seed hoops did not significantly decrease the detection rates of either group, perhaps owing to our short, autumnal study period and the locations of our study sites. Coyotes tended to visit feeders that provided sunflower seeds over mixed seed. Our results suggest that individuals who feed birds can discourage coyotes by providing seeds that are less palatable to coyotes. Logic and much other research suggest that coyotes will be less attracted to sites where all forms of anthropogenic food are removed or secured.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".