The Cackle Call of Female Blue Grouse: Does It Have a Mating or Aggressive Function?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The "quaver cry" or "cackle" is a vocalization given by female Blue Grouse (Dendragapus obscurus) on their breeding range during spring and summer.This paper summarizes research designed to test three hypotheses of the function of the cackle.(1) The cackle indicates a readiness to mate in females.(2) The cackle synchronizes the breeding cycles of males and females.(3) The cackle is an aggressive call, related to spacing behavior in females.Stirling and Bendell (1970) advanced the first two hypotheses to account for the temporal association of the call with copulation in Blue Grouse.The call was hypothesized to be aggressive in nature because captive hens cackled when they attacked their mirror images (Stirling 1968, Stirling and Bendell 1970).The research reported here is part of a more comprehensive study investigating the reproductive biology, behavior, and movement patterns of female Blue Grouse and their relation to population regulation (Hannon 1978).The study was conducted on the east slope of Vancouver Island, 16 km west of Courtenay, British Columbia in the spring and summer of 1976 and 1977.Experiments were of two types: a series of transects designed to assess the temporal and behavioral response of males and females to the call, and experiments with individual hens to determine whether or not they would respond aggressively to a calling hen placed nearby.Four transects were established along abandoned logging roads to determine how males and females responded to the cackle.A 5-min tape of a series of cackles was played at each of 5 stations situated at 400-m intervals along the transect.A mounted female was placed at the edge of the road.For 1 min prior to playing the tape, the total number of hoots (the song of territorial males), whoots (a single syllable call given by a male during courtship of a hen), and cackles was noted.The cackle tape was played and all responses of females recorded.After completion of the tape, additional male and female vocalizations were tabulated for 1 more min.I initiated experiments 1 h before sunset, a period when grouse activity is high (Bendell 1955), and surveyed each transect once weekly from 6 April to 2 June.Another 40 trials were conducted from 13 April to 4 June, with individual hens found by a trained pointing dog.A trial consisted of withdrawing approximately 20 m from the bird, setting up a mounted female in a conspicuous position, waiting 20 min in silence, playing the taped cackle, and noting the Ben's response.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".