Variation in winter flocking associations and dispersion patterns in the turnstone Arenaria interpres

• Published in: Journal of Zoology
• Main Author: Metcalfe, N. B.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 1986
• Subjects: Animal Science and Zoology; Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics; Arenaria interpres
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7998.1986.tb03600.x; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1469-7998.1986.tb03600.x; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1469-7998.1986.tb03600.x; https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1469-7998.1986.tb03600.x

Individual turnstones were found to maintain the same small foraging home ranges each winter, despite the interruptions of a migration to distant breeding grounds. Seasonal variations in fidelity to home ranges were possibly due to local sampling of food distributions in autumn and constraints on remaining with flocks in spring. The limited movements of birds on the wintering grounds resulted in little mixing of the population; multi‐dimensional scaling and cluster analyses showed that foraging birds regularly flocked with as few as 50 other individuals during the course of a winter, despite often roosting in flocks of several hundred. These associations between birds remained stable over long periods of time, although there were seasonal and tidal variations in the overall extent of association. Dominant birds, which kleptoparasitized those more subordinate, had smaller home ranges. They also tended to be in smaller flocks, and thus on average had weaker associations with other birds than did subordinates, possibly due to their being avoided by those more subordinate.