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Learning how to help migrating swans find forage

Do foraging decisions tell us something about the cost of foraging? Dutch swan experts at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) were interested in the apparent heterogeneity in the use of agricultural fields by migratory Bewicks swans. In Wieringermeer, a typical Dutch polder that was reclaimed from the sea in 1930, Bewicks swans stop by during migration to feed on the leftovers of sugarbeets that remain after the farmers harvest. The ornithologists were interested in why some fields were used more intensively than others, while all fields seem to offer similar amounts of food right from the start. They wondered: "In case foraging benefits seem to be equal across all fields, there may be variation in foraging costs that may explain the observed spatial heterogeneity in exploitation." The authors showed, in the May issue of the American Naturalist, that the time spent feeding on a field by a flock of swans can be used as a surrogate of an individuals energy intake rate (which declines over time due to depletion). This showed that an individuals intake rate at abandoning a field, which should reflect the foraging cost as experienced by the bird itself, decreased with the distance to roads and increased with the distance to its nighttime roost. The higher intake rates at which fields near roads were given up reflected the chance to be disturbed by humans. The higher intake rates at which fields far from roosts were given up could be explained by the energetic cost of flight, which are substantial for large birds such as Bewicks swans. When taking these flight costs into account, the authors calculated that the net benefits at which each field was given up corresponded with the net benefits obtained in the long run. The latter was measured via regular visual inspection of the thickness of each birds belly!

All these insights into foraging costs could be implemented into a model that predicted the number of swans that potentially could stop by at
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Contact: Patricia Morse
pmorse@uchicago.edu
773-702-0446
University of Chicago Press Journals
30-Apr-2007


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