Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Birds optimize foraging either by minimizing energy loss through passive movement or by maximizing energetic gain through foraging.

An international team of researchers assessed whether signals of either of these strategies are detectable in the timing of birds’ daily movement activity. They compared timing of movement among species and examined how flight mode, such as soaring or flapping, and foraging habitat affected the timing of movement activity. Using a combined data set of 64,570 days of GPS movement data for 991 birds from 49 species, researchers found that dissimilarity among daily activity patterns was best explained by flight mode. Terrestrial soaring birds began activity later and stopped activity earlier than pelagic (open ocean) soaring or flapping birds. Among pelagic birds, surface foragers were active throughout all 24 hours of the day while diving foragers matched their active hours more closely to daylight hours. This study demonstrates that flight mode and foraging habitat influence temporal patterns of daily movement activity of birds.
 

Mallon, J.M., Tucker, M., Beard, A., Bierregaard, Jr., R.O., Bildstein, K.L., Böhning-Gaese, K., Brzorad, J.N., Buechley, E.R., Bustamante, J., Carrapato, C., Castillo-Guerrero, J.A., Clingham, E., Desholm, M., DeSorbo, C.R., Domenech, R., Douglas, H., Duriez, O., Enggist, P., Farwig, N., Fiedler, W., Gagliardo, A., Garcia-Ripollés, C., Gil Gallús, J.A., Gilmour, M.E., Harel, R., Harrison, A., Henry, L., Katzner, T.E., Kays, R., Kleyheeg, E., Limiñana, R., López-López, P., Lucia, G., Maccarone, A., Mallia, E., Mellone, U., Mojica, E.K., Nathan, R., Newman, S.H., Oppel, S., Orchan, Y., Prosser, D.J., Riley, H., Rösner, S., Schabo, D.G., Schulz, H., Shaffer, S., Shreading, A., Silva, J.P., Sim, J., Skov, H., Spiegel, O., Stuber, M.J., Takekawa, J.Y., Urios, V., Vidal-Mateo, J., Warner, K.S., Watts, B.D., Weber, N., Weber, S., Wikelski, M., Žydelis, R., Mueller, T., Fagan, W.F., 2020, Diurnal timing of nonmigratory movement by birds: the importance of foraging spatial scales: Journal of Avian Biology, https://doi.org/10.1111/jav.02612 

Get Our News

These items are in the RSS feed format (Really Simple Syndication) based on categories such as topics, locations, and more. You can install and RSS reader browser extension, software, or use a third-party service to receive immediate news updates depending on the feed that you have added. If you click the feed links below, they may look strange because they are simply XML code. An RSS reader can easily read this code and push out a notification to you when something new is posted to our site.