Songbird incubation dilemmas in the alpine: managing parent-offspring trade-offs in a variable thermal environment ...

• Main Author: MacDonald, Elizabeth Catherine
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2012
• Subjects: Eremophila alpestris
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0072809; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0072809

Small-bodied bird species exhibiting single-sex incubation must expend energy to create a buffered thermal environment for their eggs, while also meeting their own energetic requirements. The resultant trade-off between incubation and foraging is intensified in cold environments like the alpine, where energetic constraints are high. Ambient temperature influences incubation behaviour, with variable relationships across species, habitats and populations. I examined incubation rhythms of an alpine population of Horned Larks (Eremophila alpestris) in British Columbia across four years with different thermal regimes (2005 = moderate, 2006 = warm, 2010 = cold overnight, 2011 = cold during day) to determine whether incubating larks exhibited variable relationships between attentivity and temperature under different thermal conditions and how this related to management of the parent-offspring trade-off. Early in the morning, females had to leave their nest to forage to reduce their energy deficit following 7 h of ...