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Although managing habitats in the context of climate change is increasingly important in Western North America, management recommendations are often lacking at fine scales relevant for management. Identifying management actions for climate adaptation requires an understanding of how wildlife (i) might vary in their response to habitat conditions across their range and (ii) the spatial scale of environmental effects. We quantified breeding habitat use of the Interior population of Band-tailed Pigeons (Patagioenas fasciata) in the Southwestern U.S. by analyzing data from satellite-tagged birds with a resource selection function. We used Reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) to quantify habitat use of Band-tailed Pigeons across vegetation, topography, and precipitation, examining the possibility for differences in habitat selection and estimated the most ecologically relevant spatio-temporal scale for these habitat features (i.e., the optimal "scale of effect"). Our RJMCMC results indicated that Band-tailed Pigeon intensity of use was characterized by precipitation × conifer cover and precipitation × basal area interactions. In drier areas, Band-tailed Pigeons were more likely to use areas with more conifer cover; as precipitation increased, Band-tailed Pigeons were more likely to use areas with less conifer cover. Increased precipitation facilitated greater use of forests with higher basal area, and drier areas were associated with use of forests with lower basal area. Conifer cover was primarily selected at the 1 km scale, and basal area was selected at the 2 km scale in response to precipitation during the winter preceding the breeding season. Although Band-tailed Pigeons have long been known to associate with conifer forests, we found that their use of conifer forest varied across a gradient of precipitation. Using our approach to select the scale of effect for forest habitat and basal area in response to changes in precipitation can provide more precise, spatially relevant habitat management recommendations than approaches using model selection such as Akaike's Information Criterion. Les précipitations ont un effet sur l'utilisation des forêts de conifères par le Pigeon à queue barrée de l'intérieurRÉSUMÉ. Bien que la gestion des habitats en contexte de changements climatiques soit de plus en plus importante dans l'ouest de l'Amérique du Nord, les recommandations de gestion font souvent défaut aux échelles fines pertinentes. La sélection de mesures de gestion destinées à l'adaptation au climat nécessite une compréhension de la façon dont la faune (i) pourrait varier dans sa réponse aux conditions de l'habitat dans son aire de répartition et (ii) l'échelle spatiale des effets environnementaux. Nous avons quantifié l'utilisation de l'habitat de reproduction de la population intérieure de Pigeons à queue barrée (Patagioenas fasciata) dans le sud-ouest des États-Unis en analysant les données d'oiseaux munis d'émetteurs satellitaires avec une fonction de sélection des ressources. Nous avons utilisé la mé...

Obtaining survival estimates on the Interior population of bandtailed pigeons (Patagioenas fasciata) is challenging because they are trap shy, but the joint use of passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags and bands is a potential solution. We investigated the use of PIT tags to passively recapture band-tailed pigeon at 3 locations in New Mexico, USA, to estimate survival. From 2013-2015, we captured, banded, and marked >600 individual band-tailed pigeons with PIT tags. To estimate annual survival rates, we used a Barker multi-state joint live and dead encounters and resighting model. Survival models excluding transience had survival estimates across site, sex, and year of 0.86 (95% CI = 0.84-0.88) for after hatch year birds and 0.63 (95% CI = 0.48-0.76) for hatch year birds. These results are consistent with other survival estimates reported for the Interior population of band-tailed pigeons using band return data and potentially provide an effective alternative method of monitoring survival of this population. K E Y W O R D S band-tailed pigeon, mark-recapture, New Mexico, passive integrated transponder, Patagioenas fasciata, survival Band-tailed pigeons (Patagioenas fasciata) are a migratory game bird found in 2 distinct regions of temperate North America managed as separate populations: Pacific and Interior. Band-tailed pigeons breed from northern Colorado and east-central Utah south through Arizona, New Mexico, and the Trans Pecos area of west Texas, USA, into the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico. The Interior population winters primarily from northern Mexico south to at least Michoacán (Braun et al. 1975, American Ornithologists' Union 1983), but some winter in New Mexico, and likely in parts of Arizona and Texas (Collins et al. 2019). Interior and Pacific populations migrate in winter to