Contrasting Nest-Site Characteristics and Antipredator Nest-Defense Strategies of Two Subarctic Breeding Shorebirds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Changing vegetation and animal communities in the subarctic from a warming climate may influence behaviour and nest success of breeding shorebirds. Nest site characteristics and antipredator defense behaviour in two cryptic shorebirds, Stilt Sandpipers Calidris himantopus and Short-billed Dowitchers Limnodromus griseus, are known only by qualitative descriptions. Our objective was to determine if Short-billed Dowitchers breeding at the northern edge of their range and Stilt Sandpipers breeding at the southern edge of their range differ in nest site characteristics, and if, as a result, they employ different defense strategies to minimize detection during incubation. We measured vegetation and the extent of concealment at nest sites of both species in fens near Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, and scored behavioural responses to human intruders during regular nest visits. Water depth and vegetation height within 1 m2 of Short-billed Dowitcher nests were significantly higher than those around Stilt Sandpiper nests but there was no difference in substrate types at or around the nest. Concealment was significantly greater at nests of Short-billed Dowitcher than Stilt Sandpiper. For nests found before hatch, 85% for Short-billed Dowitcher and 57% for Stilt Sandpiper were successful. During 27% of nest visits for Stilt Sandpipers and 5% for Short-billed Dowitchers, eggs were unattended upon our arrival at the nest and no incubating birds were present in the area. While both species exhibited a range of defense behaviours, Short-billed Dowitchers flushed nearly underfoot after disturbance from an observer and engaged in significantly more aggressive defense behaviours such as distraction displays, whereas Stilt Sandpipers typically flushed from nests or departed before the arrival of observers. These differences highlight the importance of considering nuanced behaviors in apparent response to the local environment in the context of ongoing environmental changes in the subarctic.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".