Thomas Stanley, Ph.D. (Former Employee)

Energetic costs of nest construction are difficult to estimate for birds, and currently estimates are available for only a handful of species. In this paper, I estimate the minimum cost of nest construction by a pair of Black-billed Magpies (Pica hudsonia). Data on the number of sticks and mud pellets comprising a nest were used to determine the minimum number of trips required to...

Riparian vegetation in western North America provides important habitat for breeding birds and valuable forage for grazing livestock. Whereas a number of studies have documented the response of riparian vegetation to the removal of cattle, few have experimentally evaluated specific grazing systems. We evaluated the responses of vegetation and breeding birds to two cycles of late-season...

We studied Wilson's Warbler (Wilsonia pusilla) and Yellow Warbler (Dendroica petechia) habitat use in allopatric and sympatric populations in the Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming in order to better understand the different habitat needs and interactions of these two species. Foraging Wilson's Warblers and Yellow Warblers used very similar habitat, both...

No abstract available.

In studies of avian nesting success, it is often of interest to estimate stage-specific daily survival probabilities of nests. When data can be partitioned by nesting stage (e.g., incubation stage, nestling stage), piecewise application of the Mayfield method or Johnson's method is appropriate. However, when the data contain nests where the transition from one stage to the next occurred...

Nest predation is the principal cause of mortality for many grassland birds. Predation rates may be higher on prairie dog colonies because they may have less available nesting cover and may increase predator abundance. We compared 14-day nest predation rates for 1,764 artificial nests on 102 black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) colonies and their paired off-colony sites...