In the agricultural landscapes of Europe, the White Stork (Ciconia ciconia) prefers to forage on meadows with short vegetation. Thus, food supply for the nestlings and, consequently, breeding success of this central‐place forager depend on the temporal and spatial mowing activities of farmers around the nest to generate a patchy and dynamic food availability. Using a spatially explicit model, we study the impact of different land use patterns on food supply and breeding success of a central‐place forager. The conclusions of our model are twofold. First, for the White Stork, our model suggests that sequential (asynchronous) mowing increases breeding success compared to the synchronous mowing activities presently applied by farmers. Second and more generally, we conclude that, with increasing heterogeneity and dynamics of the landscape, the patch selection strategy becomes increasingly important for predicting food supply. Thus, landscape‐oriented behavior is an important, but often neglected, component of conservation biology and management, especially in agricultural landscapes.
Every year birdwatchers throughout Europe record the arrival of a considerable number of vagrants from the eastern Palaearctic. We analysed the occurrence of such vagrants in Central Europe of the genera Phylloscopus, Turdus and Zoothera in Central Europe. Our results revealed that the occurrence of a species depended on total population size, but not on body size. Furthermore, the occurrence of species in Central Europe increased with distance between the breeding range and wintering range, but the distance between the breeding range and Europe had no effect. These results indicate that the migratory restlessness of species determines whether an East Asian species arrives in Europe. Overall, our data support the hypothesis that the migratory program determines vagrancy.
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