Constantine Alexander's blog

Bird's playlist could signal mental strengths and weaknesses

Photo by: Robert Lachlan, Duke

Having the biggest playlist doesn't make a male songbird the brainiest of the bunch, a new study shows.

"For songbirds, singing a lot of songs indicates a bird is smart, but that signal is not necessarily indicative of intelligence for everything," said Duke biologist Steve Nowicki.

In a series of problem-solving tests with the birds, he and his colleagues found that the male song sparrows that sang the most songs learned to solve food-finding puzzles more slowly than the birds singing fewer songs. The results are the first to show that a larger song repertoire links to cognitive deficits in other mental processes.

The researchers think that female song sparrows may use potential mates' songs to gauge both mental strengths and weaknesses.

Since birdsong is a good model for studying speech development, the findings, published May 22 in Biology Letters, could also help neuroscientists better understand the trade-offs taking place as the human brain matures.

Nowicki and collaborators first measured the number of songs 14 male song sparrows sang. They then taught the birds to identify where a mealworm was hidden in one of 12 shallow wells on a wooden rectangle. The scientists put plastic caps over six wells so that the birds had to learn and remember spatially where the worm was on the wooden block.

The birds that learned to solve the food puzzle more quickly sang fewer songs -- an observation opposite of what the scientists expected.

"This study is very exciting," said University of Nevada-Reno biologist Vladimir Pravosudov, who was not involved in the study. "It is the first of its kind to show a negative correlation between song repertoire size and spatial memory in songbirds, and it goes against the grain of what many scientists had thought about the relationship between song and other cognitive abilities in birds."

Earlier studies with starlings had shown that the birds with larger playlists learned to solve spatial tasks more quickly. Other studies had also shown that a bird that sang more songs performed better on other cognitive tasks.

This newly discovered negative relationship between the number of songs a bird sings and speed of solving a spatial task suggests there is a trade-off between song learning and other cognitive abilities, Nowicki said.

He noted one caveat with the experiment -- the fact that song sparrows don't cache their food or migrate long distances. Both require advanced spatial learning and memory, but the ability isn't as important for sparrows as it is for blue jays and other species.

Still, the negative correlation suggests birds' brains may develop differently depending on how much effort is put toward learning songs or doing other mental tasks. Song learning happens in the HVC, the area of the bird's brain that controls song. Spatial learning happens in the hippocampus. During development, more resources may go to one area or the other, giving an individual bird a strength in one cognitive ability and a weakness in the other, Nowicki said.

The study supports the idea of trade-offs in the development of the birds' brains. But, "This behavioral data is only tip of iceberg," Pravosudov said. Scientists will need to look at the structures, circuits and chemicals in the birds' brains to better understand mechanistically what the new results mean for brain development.

Nowicki agrees and said his team may perform those experiments next. If the work pans out, he added, scientists could one day use songbirds and birdsong to better understand how trade-offs in brain development influence behavior and cognition in humans too.

Citation: "Potential trade-off between vocal ornamentation and spatial ability in a songbird." Sewall, K., Soha, J., Peters, S., Nowicki S. 2013. Biology Letters 20130344. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.0344

Contact: Ashley Yeager
ashley.yeager@duke.edu
919-681-8057
Duke University

Who's your daddy?

Infidelity and paternity in reed warblers

Depending on the species, males have different strategies. They may try to ensure paternity by increased surveillance and fighting off the competition, or by having more frequent sex with their long-term partners. Others react by physically punishing unfaithful females or by reducing parental care once the – potentially unrelated – offspring has arrived. Herbert Hoi and colleagues of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, together with scientists from the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, carried out experiments with reed warblers to see how a situation of potential infidelity affects later paternal investment in the chicks and whether it does in fact lead to extra-pair mating. They found that the males aggressively try to chase off competitors and to keep potentially "double-dealing" females in line. But whether or not they manage, they turn out to be caring fathers once the babies are born. The findings were published in April 2013 in the online journal PLOS ONE.

Reed warblers are socially monogamous, defend their territory, and both parents care for the offspring. Scientists of the Konrad-Lorenz-Institute of Ethology of the Vetmeduni Vienna for the first time tried to experimentally test the behaviour of reed warblers (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) after a potential act of "cheating" by the female. How does the male treat a competitor, and how does an "affair" affect care for the brood? To answer these questions they simulated an increased risk of adulterous behaviour in female reed warblers by briefly introducing a caged extra male to 31 reed warbler pairs during the female´s fertile period. In addition they played back recorded songs of randomly selected warbler males from the area. The scientists then observed nest building activity and feeding of offspring, and determined chick paternity through DNA analyses.

When the going gets tough

From previous observations it was known that male territory owners will aggressively try to chase away intruders (conspecific males) as soon as they detect them. This territorial behaviour is interpreted as a paternity guard. Herbert Hoi and his colleagues observed that all males tried to attack and chase away the caged intruder. When the female appeared to show interest in the intruder, the male behaved considerably more aggressively, both to the intruder and to his female partner. Almost half of the females did not even approach the newcomer. Herbert Hoi explains, "We think that the males are more aggressive when their partners are watching because first, it only pays for the male to show off when the "babe" is watching him, and second, he certainly has more reason to fear being cuckolded or even losing his partner when the newcomer approaches his female."

A "cuckoo" in the nest

Hoi and colleagues found that many nests housed nestlings fathered outside the pair-bond. This was the case both in the experimental and in the control group. Those females that had been observed to show interest in the intruder were also later found to be more likely to have extra-pair chicks in their nest. In addition, the results suggest that larger females seem to be more promiscuous.

Cuckolded males are caring fathers

The researchers then looked at whether offspring care was affected by paternity uncertainty. The results were surprising: Males seem to readily procure food for the chicks, regardless whether they are their own or not. Females, however, cared significantly less for their young if they had been faced with the simulated intruder. Perhaps the female´s potential infidelity had no effect on the male´s subsequent feeding investment because he cannot distinguish his own from an extra-pair chick. On the other hand, females who perceived their males as unable to repel an intruder quickly enough and therefore as a "weakling", then invest less in the joint offspring. The only chance a male has to ensure successful paternity seems to be to quickly get rid of potential competitors.

Citation: Hoi H, Krištofík J, Darolová A (2013) Experimentally Simulating Paternity Uncertainty: Immediate and Long-Term Responses of Male and Female Reed Warblers Acrocephalus scirpaceus. PLoS ONE 8(4): e62541. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062541

Contact: Dr. Herbert Hoi
Herbert.Hoi@vetmeduni.ac.at
43-148-909-15824
University of Veterinary Medicine -- Vienna

Black vulture returns to East Balkans

A black vulture (Aegypius monachus) has been spotted in the Eastern Balkan Mountains for the first time for more than 30 years. A photo-trap set up at the vulture supplementary feeding site in the area of the Sinite Kamani Nature Park captured a young black vulture in April, together with a group of foraging griffons. The pictured bird was released as part of the LIFE project, 'Vultures Return in Bulgaria'.

The vulture probably originated from Serbia and was recorded along with several wild, non-tagged young and sub-adult griffon vultures (Gyps fulvus).

Black vulture was once widely distributed across the country, mostly in the plain areas but also in hilly areas and the broad-leaved forest belt – namely, the Dobrudzha, Ludogorie, Shumen and Provadija plateaus, the Danube plain, the slopes of Sakar, Vitosha, the mountains surrounding Sofia, the Rhodopes and south-eastern Bulgaria.

However, the use of poison, traps and poachers led to the complete extinction of the black vulcan as a nesting species. The last confirmed nest of the species was found by the Green Balkans team in the area of the Studen Kladenets Reservoir in 1997 and since then no nesting has been confirmed.

But the country is often visited by black vultures, which still nest in the Dadia Reserve in northern Greece and cross the border in search of food. They often use the supplementary feeding sites that have been maintained by Green Balkans and the BSPB for the past 25 years.

The siting of the black vulture at the supplementary feeding site represents a huge success for the project. Griffon vulture is an indicator species, which it is hoped confirms the improved conditions of the Balkan Mountains.

Scientists find impact of open-ocean industrial fishing within centuries of bird bones

A Hawaiian petrel flies over part of its Pacific Ocean foraging grounds. Credit: Jim Denny

The impact of industrial fishing on coastal ecosystems has been studied for many years. But how it affects food webs in the open ocean―a vast region that covers almost half of the Earth's surface―has not been very clear. So a team of Smithsonian and Michigan State University scientists and their colleagues looked to the ancient bones of seabirds for answers, revealing some of the dramatic changes that have happened within open-ocean food webs since the onset of industrial fishing. The team's research is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Few records of species that live in the open ocean date back more than 60 years, and the sheer size of open-ocean regions makes their food webs difficult to study. The Hawaiian petrel (Pterodroma sandwichensis), a crow-sized oceanic bird, offered the team a solution. These birds range widely over the northeast Pacific, and their diets integrate food webs from that vast area.

400 to 1,000-year-old bones from an endangered seabird, the Hawaiian petrel. These bones represent a small fraction of those collected from the species. They offer a window into the lives of seabirds before and after the arrival of humans in the open ocean environments of the Pacific. Credit: Brittany Hance, Smithsonian Institution

What the petrels have eaten is recorded in the chemistry of their bones. By extracting protein from bones and feathers and studying stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the protein, the scientists were able to assess the birds' diet and how it changed over centuries. What they found from bones 100 to 4,000 years old were nitrogen isotope ratios that were consistently high, indicating a diet of relatively large prey. Those less than a century old, after industrial fishing started, had low ratios, revealing a shift to smaller fish, squid and other prey.

"The question is, have the effects of open-ocean fishing gone beyond targeted species, like tuna," said Anne Wiley, lead author, Smithsonian postdoctoral researcher and former MSU doctoral student. "Our study is among the very first to show that it has, and because Hawaiian petrels eat such a wide variety of prey over a large area, our results suggest that fishery influence may be widespread and profound in the Pacific. Understanding the influence of fisheries on open-ocean food webs has been one of the great mysteries of biological oceanography."

The team's isotope records are unusual because they are from all the known populations of the species, which breed on different Hawaiian Islands. The records show that separate populations of Hawaiian petrels hunted in different areas of the open ocean for thousands of years. The scientists revealed a foraging shift in multiple Hawaiian petrel populations, emphasizing that the petrels' diets changed across a very broad expanse of the ocean. This sudden shift in the past 100 years suggests a relatively rapid change in the composition of oceanic food webs in the Northeast Pacific.

"Conservation efforts for endangered seabirds take place mainly on land at breeding colonies where there are obvious threats like introduced predators," said Helen James, coauthor and research zoologist at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. "Our study suggests we should pay more attention to the lives of these birds at sea."

Further studies are needed to explore how the change in foraging is affecting the Hawaiian petrel. Similar shifts down the food chain in other species have been associated with decreases in population size―potentially a bad sign for the Hawaiian petrel, which already has a small population restricted to the Hawaiian islands and is listed as "vulnerable" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

Contact: John Gibbons
gibbonsjp@si.edu
202-633-5187
Smithsonian

Networking for migratory birds - World Migratory Bird Day 2013

Whooper Swans returning to the WWT reserve at Welney on the Ouse Washes in Norfolk after migration from Iceland. Photo Credit: Nick Ford (CC)

“How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way

is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?”

William Blake

Bird migration is so extraordinary that there seems something almost supernatural about it: the more we find out about the feats of navigation and endurance performed by migratory birds, the more amazing they seem. Tiny hummingbirds whirring across the Gulf of Mexico, Bar-tailed Godwits covering eleven thousand kilometres in non-stop flight, soaring birds spiralling in their tens of thousands over land-bridges, songbirds dropping down to hidden desert oases just in time… the abilities of migratory birds are awe-inspiring.

Coming down to earth, however, the threats that migrants face are all too real – and very often migrant birds are under huge pressure at the exact points where they are most vulnerable. Birds battling to reach the sea-shore descend into a limitless line of nets. Tiny falcons funnel through forests to be trapped in their thousands. Exhausted shorebirds find that the mudflats where they once refuelled are now a sea of concrete, or circle wearily because their roosting sites have vanished. These are just some examples that have caught attention in the last few months – indicative of the increasing challenges that migrants now face on their journeys all over the world.

The theme of this year’s World Migratory Bird Day, networking for migratory birds, resonates particularly strongly for BirdLife. BirdLife itself is a network, of people and Partner organisations connected up and down all the globe’s flyways – taking action together for conservation. And BirdLife has devoted much effort, through the Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas Programme, to identifying, mapping, monitoring and safeguarding the networks of sites most important for migratory birds.

However, as the examples above show, networks are only as strong as their weakest links. Migratory birds use sites and habitats along the length of their flyways: they need looking after along the length of their flyways too. BirdLife’s Migratory Birds and Flyways Programme, one of nine key conservation programmes in the new BirdLife strategy, brings together the actions of BirdLife Partners at a flyways scale. Within the programme, Partners are working with national governments and others through focused projects, such as the Migratory Soaring Birds Project, working to integrate bird conservation within key economic sectors along the Great Rift Valley flyway; or Living on the Edge, working to address threats to migrant songbirds in the Sahel.

On 11-12 May, members and supporters of BirdLife Partners around the world will once again be out raising awareness and taking action for the world’s amazing and inspiring migratory birds. Thanks to all involved in co-ordinating this year’s event, and especially to CMS and AEWA – and come and join the celebrations!

Dr. Marco Lambertini,

Chief Executive, BirdLife International

The more feathers a male sparrow carries to the nest, the more eggs the female will lay

An international team lead by the University of Granada has found that female sparrows will invest more energy into laying eggs according to the male's ability to fill the nest with feathers which serve to insulate the chicks from the cold and keep them alive.

Scientists from the University of Granada, in collaboration with the South African University of the Witwatersrand and the Percy FitzPatrick Institute at the University of Cape Town, have discovered that the female house sparrow (Passer domesticus) invests more energy into laying eggs when the male brings more feathers to the nest.

"We conducted an experiment with two types of treatments and a control group. In total, we observed the behaviour of 50 pairs of sparrows," Lola García López de Hierro, the study's main researcher, informed SINC.

According to their results, carrying feathers could be a result of sexual selection by the females as they put more energy into reproduction if they have more feathers in the nest. "They provide excellent insulation and the females know that less chicks will die if the male brings more feathers," the expert stated.

The experiment was conducted in the natural environment of Dassen Island (South Africa) and this is the first time this behaviour has been documented in the house sparrow.

Taking away and adding feathers

The researchers took away and added feathers to the nests of the fifty pairs of sparrows during these birds' different mating seasons.

A first stage in the treatment consisted of spending an hour observing the behaviour of the pairs with chicks less than five days old in order to register diverse variables and watch their behaviour if a series of feathers were taken away or if these feathers were left in the nest. The experiment was then repeated with chicks over ten days old.

"We had film recordings of the nest where we gathered information on sparrow behaviour and, using a table of variables, we were able to conclude that the more feathers in the nest, the more eggs the sparrows laid," García-López de Hierro pointed out.

They also observed that when the females noticed there were feathers missing they animatedly called the males and the male sparrows responded by bringing more feathers and dancing around the female on his return to the nest.

Monogamous birds

Ninety per cent of sparrows mate for life and keep the same partner from one year to the next; however, numerous factors influence the choice of mating partner. For example, the size of the black patch on the males' chest, commonly known as the bib, indicates their biological quality. "The bigger the patch, the higher the quality, an aspect that females can easily select for," the scientist explained.

Other factors that demonstrate the male's biological capacity are the redness of the head, in other words, "the more carotene they invest in the colour of their feathers, the more reproductive success they will have," and the ratio between the size of the beak and the size of the tarsus.

Reference: Lola García López de Hierro, Marcos Moleón y Peter G. Ryan. "Is Carrying Feathers a Sexually Seleted Trait in House Sparrows?" International Journal of Behavioural Biology, 119: 199-211, 2013.

Contact: SINC
info@agenciasinc.es
34-914-251-820
FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

Tone-deaf female cowbirds change flock behavior, disrupt social networks

Birds that can't identify high quality male songs change male, female flock-mate behavior

Brown-Headed Cowbirds

Cowbirds are smallish, compact and stocky blackbirds with a short and thick-based bill, almost finchlike.

Female cowbirds incapable of recognizing high-quality male songs can alter the behavior of flock-mates of either sex and disrupt overall social structure, according to research published May 1 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Sarah Maguire and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania.

Lesioned females destabilize the social network of mixed-sex flocks. Social network structure for each observation session in experiment 2. Lines represent directed singing interactions. Letters/numbers beside nodes represent individual identity, (females: squares males: circles). Vertical spacing of males represents relative dominance rank based on male-directed singing ratio. Numbers beside males in parentheses represent change in dominance rank from the observation session before the one shown. Thickness of the line represents number of songs sung (largest line = 208 songs [aviary 2, lesioned introduction, M1 to A], smallest = 5 songs [multiple instances]). Arrows represent direction of singing interaction. Credit: Maguire SE, Schmidt MF, White DJ

Individual traits can impact a social network even in cowbirds, but the impact of changing individual behavior on the group as a whole can be difficult to elucidate. Here, the researchers inactivated female brain regions responsible for identifying high-quality mating songs. Though they did not record significant changes in the behavior of these birds individually, these 'tone-deaf' females had surprisingly strong effects on group dynamics in a mixed flock. Female birds with these regions inactivated received courtship songs from more males than normal females. As a result, males in the group changed their dominance status and courtship patterns, and the competitive behaviors of other females in the group were also affected. Aspects of behavior traditionally thought to be under male control, such as pair-bonding and mate guarding, were also influenced by the presence of these female birds in the flock. According to the authors, their results highlight the interconnected nature of an individual and its social environment, where neural systems which determine individual behavior can have a significant impact on social behaviors of the species.

Maguire adds, "This work is the first to experimentally probe the structure of social networks by determining how individual circuits and behavior interact to form group stability."

Citation: Maguire SE, Schmidt MF, White DJ (2013) Social Brains in Context: Lesions Targeted to the Song Control System in Female Cowbirds Affect Their Social Network. PLoS ONE 8(5): e63239. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063239

Bird fossil sheds light on how swift and hummingbird flight came to be

Exceptionally well-preserved fossil feathers enable researchers to reconstruct wing shape in ways not possible with bones alone

12 centimeters from head to tail, E. rowei was an evolutionary precursor to the group that includes today's swifts and hummingbirds. Photo contributed by Lance Grande of the Field Museum of Natural History

A tiny bird fossil discovered in Wyoming offers clues to the precursors of swift and hummingbird wings. The fossil is unusual in having exceptionally well-preserved feathers, which allowed the researchers to reconstruct the size and shape of the bird's wings in ways not possible with bones alone.

Researchers spotted the specimen — the nearly complete skeleton of a bird that would have fit in the palm of your hand and weighed less than an ounce — while working at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

The newly discovered bird was named Eocypselus rowei, in honor of John W. Rowe, Chairman of the Field Museum's Board of Trustees.

First collected in southwestern Wyoming in a fossil site known as the Green River Formation, E. rowei lived roughly 50 million years ago, after the dinosaurs disappeared but before the earliest humans came to be.

E. rowei was a tiny bird – only twelve centimeters from head to tail. Feathers account for more than half of the bird's total wing length.

To find out where the fossil fit in the bird family tree, the researchers compared the specimen to extinct and modern day species. Their analyses suggest that the bird was an evolutionary precursor to the group that includes today's swifts and hummingbirds.

Given the differences in wing shape between these two closely related groups of birds, scientists have puzzled over how swift and hummingbird flight came to be. Finding fossil relatives like this specimen is key to figuring that out, the researchers say.

"This fossil bird represents the closest we've gotten to the point where swifts and hummingbirds went their separate ways," said lead author Daniel Ksepka of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina.

Hummingbirds have short wings relative to their bodies, which makes them good at hovering in mid-air. Swifts have super-long wings for gliding and high-speed flight. But the wings of E. rowei were somewhere in between.

"[Based on its wing shape] it probably wasn't a hoverer, like a hummingbird, and it probably wasn't as efficient at fast flight as a swift," Ksepka said.

The shape of the bird's wings, coupled with its tiny size, suggest that the ancestors of today's swifts and hummingbirds got small before each group's unique flight behavior came to be. "Hummingbirds came from small-bodied ancestors, but the ability to hover didn't come to be until later," Ksepka explained.

Closer study of the feathers under a scanning electron microscope revealed that carbon residues in the fossils — once thought to be traces of bacteria that fed on feathers — are fossilized melanosomes, tiny cell structures containing melanin pigments that give birds and other animals their color. The findings suggest that the ancient bird was probably black and may have had a glossy or iridescent sheen, like swifts living today. Based on its beak shape it probably ate insects, the researchers say.

The other authors of this study were Julia Clarke, Sterling Nesbitt and Felicia Kulp of the University of Texas at Austin, and Lance Grande of the Field Museum of Natural History.

CITATION: Ksepka, D., et al. (2013). "Fossil evidence of wing shape in a stem relative of swifts and hummingbirds (Aves, Pan-Apodiformes)." Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Contact: Robin Ann Smith
rsmith@nescent.org
919-668-4544
National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent)

Behavior of seabirds during migration revealed

Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus). Photo by: Ómar Runólfsson (CC)

The behaviour of seabirds during migration – including patterns of foraging, rest and flight – has been revealed in new detail using novel computational analyses and tracking technologies.

Using a new method called 'ethoinformatics', described as the application of computational methods in the investigation of animal behaviour, scientists have been able to analyse three years of migration data gathered from miniature tracking devices attached to the small seabird the Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus).

The Manx Shearwater is currently on the 'amber' list of UK Birds of Conservation Concern. Up to 80% of the world population breeds in the UK, travelling 20,000km each year in their migrations to South America and back.

In a continuing long-term collaboration, researchers at UCL and the University of Oxford collected data over three consecutive years. In this study, published in the Royal Society journal Interface, they show that the migration of the Manx Shearwater contains a complex pattern of three behavioural states; rest, flight and foraging.

Results indicate that in winter, birds spend much less time foraging and in flight than in breeding season. Also, a much larger proportion of birds' time in the southern hemisphere was spent at rest - probably a reflection of their release from the demands of reproduction and also the increased costs of flight during the winter.

Dr Robin Freeman, from the UCL COMPLEX (Centre for Mathematics and Physics in the Life Sciences and Experimental Biology), and first author of the study, said: "Understanding the behaviour of these birds during migration is crucial for identifying important at-sea locations and for furthering conservation efforts. By tracking the movements, foraging behaviour and environmental drivers of such species, and developing new techniques to do so is critical as they continue to be subject to environmental and anthropogenic pressure."

He added: "Methods to understand animal behaviour from complex data series – what we're calling 'ethoinformatics' - are increasingly important as we continue to gather large amounts of data about animals in the wild."

Professor Tim Guilford, who leads the team at the University of Oxford, said: "At the Oxford navigation group, we have been able to gather an unprecedented amount of information about these elusive ocean wanderers. We trying to understand the processes that govern the behaviour seabirds at sea, and the decisions they must make during migration and foraging."

During the study, birds were fitted with miniature geolocators and lightweight GPS loggers. The geolocation devices have been developed by the British Antarctic Survey and record salt-water immersion and light levels. Using behaviours identified from GPS tracking during the breeding season, the team demonstrated that these behaviours could be predicted solely from data collected by the much smaller immersion-loggers.

Unlike other devices that limit broad use because of their mass, cost and longevity (life span), these devices can record continuously for many years and weigh less than two grams.

During the birds' migratory journey the team identified areas of high foraging behaviour, with concentrations off south-eastern Brazil during the southbound journey and in the Western Atlantic during the return. Rest also occurs throughout migration, with greater concentration towards the very end of the route in both directions. This could reflect distinct stopover types, like foraging stopovers to take advantage of the high prey availability or rest stopover to recover from long flight periods.

The researchers also discovered that the birds' behaviour responded to different environmental conditions. There was a significant relationship between behaviour and environmental variables such as net primary production (the rate at which all the plants in an ecosystem produce net useful chemical energy), chlorophyll and sea surface temperature. During migration, resting behaviour was found to occur in much more productive waters than other behaviours.

Dr Freeman said: "We're very excited about these new techniques and their application to understanding the behaviour of such and important and captivating bird. This is just the beginning of our on-going investigation into understanding the behaviour of these animals in the wild."

Citation: Predictive ethoinformatics reveals the complex migratory behaviour of a pelagic seabird, the Manx Shearwater. Robin Freeman, Ben Dean, Holly Kirk, Kerry Leonard, Richard A. Phillips, Chris M. Perrins, and Tim Guilford.  J R Soc Interface 2013 10:20130279; doi:10.1098/rsif.2013.0279

Contact: Clare Ryan
clare.ryan@ucl.ac.uk
44-020-310-83846
University College London

Scale of raptor deaths in Hungary shows need for LIFE 'HELICON' project

MME Birdlife Hungary, the beneficiary of the ongoing LIFE Nature ‘HELICON’ project, took part in an event in Hungary in February that revealed the scale of the problem of illegal raptor deaths in the country.

More than 100 professionals from Hungary, Austria, Czech Republic, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and the UK attended the annual meeting of the Raptor Committee of Birdlife Hungary, which followed the 8th Hungarian Conservation-Biology Meeting (co-organised by MME with the Hungarian Biological Society, Bükk National Park Directorate and the European section of the Society for Conservation Biology).

The aims of the conference were to improve the effectiveness of actions against persecution incidents affecting birds and facilitate exchange of ideas between professionals from various countries. The participants discussed Birdlife’s Anti-poisoning Action Plan which is expected to provide a more efficient way in fighting crime against birds. 

One of the most startling things to emerge from the event was the extent of the problem of persecution of raptors in Hungary. It was announced that, since 2000, a total of 176 eagles have died in the country from poisoning, shooting or intentional damaging of nests (compared to 40 eagle deaths in Austria, 24 in the Czech Republic, 22 in Slovakia, 18 in Serbia and two in Romania).

Indeed, a further three incidents involving birds of prey were reported in the three days following the conference; just some of 21 incidents involving more than 50 protected raptors recorded for the first three months of 2013 in Hungary.

The goal of the LIFE ‘HELICON’ project, which runs until the end of 2016, is to significantly reduce the rate of non-natural mortality amongst Hungary’s imperial eagle (Aquila heliaca) population.