The Breeding Biology of the Black-legged Kittiwake in Newfoundland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
T•E Black-legged Kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla) has been the object of many studies through large parts of its range.Some of the more recent works are those of Coulson and White (1956, 1958a, 1958b, 1960, 1961), Coulson (1959Coulson ( , 1963aCoulson ( , 1963bCoulson ( , 1966Coulson ( , 1969)), Coulson and Macdonald (1962), and Hodges (1969) in Great Britain; Uspenski (1956) and Belopol'skii (1961) in the U.S.S.R.; and Swartz (1966) in Alaska.Cullen (1957) described the adaptations of Black-legged Kittiwakes to cliff-nesting, and Paludan (1955) investigated their behavior.As data on this species' breeding biology in the northwestern North Atlantic are sparse, we studied a kittiwake colony on Gull Island, Witless Bay, Newfoundland during the summers of 1969 and 1970. MATERIALS AND METHODS GullIsland (47 ø 15 t N, 52 ø 46 t W •) is the northernmost of three islands comprising the Witless Bay Seabird Sanctuary at the mouth of the aforementioned bay, approximately 1.5 miles from the nearest point of ]and.Gull Island is about 1 mile long and 1/.2 mile wide with the long axis running north-south.The island reaches an elevation of 228 feet (Canadian Wildlife Service• 1969) and is heavily wooded, except for a grassy perimeter (Puffin slopes) and rock surfaces.The underlying rock is medium-to fine-grained red sandstone of the Cabot Group (Signal Hill Formation), and is part of the major Bay Bulls syncline (Rose, 1952).The strata of the island dip in an easterly direction at 50-55% giving rise through weathering to long, narrow, westward-leaning coves on the north and south ends of the island, and providing large numbers of slanting ledges of the type apparently ideal for kittiwake nesting.The kittiwake breeding population of Gull Island was censused in both 1969 and 1970.All counts were made from the island, nests being counted individually except for four places where nests were not readily visible or accessible.In these four cases estimates were made by scaring birds from their nests and counting them as they soared into view (there are usually 1.2 birds per nest at any given time; Coulson and White, 1956) and/or by extrapolation from the density of the birds on visible parts of the same cliff.The locations of 112 nests in 1969 and 184 in 1970, which were used in the detailed studies, were designated by numbers painted on an adjacent rock face.Nests chosen at random before the birds started laying xvere checked daily in 1970 and less often in 1969 to investigate the method of nest construction and materials used, dates of egg laying, and egg mortality.Three nests were fully dissected to determine details of their construction.The length and breadth of eggs were measured with vernier calipers and the weight was taken by suspending the eggs in a plastic bag below a spring balance.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".