All feathers were prepared by first removing the calamus (i.e. the proximal, vaneless portion of the quill) and the length of the remaining portion, or segments of it, was measured and weighed. None of the samples were washed prior to hormone analysis as natural substances such as preen oils were found not to influence the results (Bortolotti et al., 2008). Feathers were stored in ordinary paper envelopes between collection (various years, see below) and analysis (2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008). Understanding what environmental perturbations are perceived as stressors, and quantifying how they are responded to, how often they occur and the negative consequences of exposure to glucocorticoids, has been problematic and limited to short-term physiological measures. By contrast, the quantification of corticosterone (CORT) in feathers represents a long-term, integrated measure of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal activity. In the present study, we show that by understanding how the hormone is deposited in feathers, in combination with specific sampling protocols, one can identify localised patterns of CORT deposition that reveal different temporal patterns of a bird's response to stressors. CORT in feathers appears to be stable over time, is resistant to heat exposure and is useful in determining both the overall exposure of the bird to the hormone over days or weeks, as well as identifying discrete, punctuated, stressful events. Variation in feather CORT can also be examined among individuals of a population at one point in time, as well as over years by using museum specimens. The ability to track stress over time allows for new questions to be asked about the health and ecology of birds and their environment.

Among vertebrates, short-term elevations of glucocorticoid hormones (corticosterone or cortisol) facilitate a suite of physiological and behavioral changes aimed at overcoming environmental perturbations or other stressful events. However, chronically elevated glucocorticoids can have deleterious physiological consequences, and it is still unclear as to what constitutes an adaptive physiological response to long-term stress. In this study, we experimentally exposed European wild rabbits Oryctolagus cuniculus to a source of long-term stress (simulated through a 2- to 4-week period of captivity) and tested whether glucocorticoid physiology predicted two major components of rabbit fitness: body condition and survival probability. Following exposure to long-term stress, moderately elevated serum corticosterone and fecal glucocorticoid metabolites levels in the wild rabbits were negatively associated with body condition, but positively associated with subsequent survival upon release. Our results suggest that the cost of maintaining elevated corticosterone levels in terms of decreased body condition is balanced by the increased chance of survival upon release.

No abstract

The decline of rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) populations in Mediterranean Spain has been shown to be one of the main threats to rabbit-specialist predators such as the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardina) and the Spanish imperial eagle (Aquila adalberti), two species which are in serious danger of extinction. Consequently, corrective measures such as increasing rabbit populations by restocking have been carried out to help the recovery of predator populations. In order to determine the general applicability of rabbit restocking for predator conservation, we performed three experimental restockings and evaluated their success in relation to season, habitat quality and the number of animals introduced. Rabbits were released either in large or small numbers in all four seasons of the year, and in habitat types defined as 'poor' or 'rich' according to the food availability for rabbits. For each restocking we evaluated rabbit survival, degree of residency and expected population increase. As a rule, the highest restocking success occurred whenever smaller number of rabbits were released in the richest quality habitat. Restocking during the breeding season was less successful than in other seasons. Problems concerning intraspecific competition, reproductive failure and diseases are discussed.

Urban endocrine ecology aims to understand how organisms cope with new sources of stress and maintain allostatic load to thrive in an increasingly urbanized world. Recent research efforts have yielded controversial results based on short-term measures of stress, without exploring its fitness effects. We measured feather corticosterone (CORTf, reflecting the duration and amplitude of glucocorticoid secretion over several weeks) and subsequent annual survival in urban and rural burrowing owls. This species shows high individual consistency in fear of humans (i.e., flight initiation distance, FID), allowing us to hypothesize that individuals distribute among habitats according to their tolerance to human disturbance. FIDs were shorter in urban than in rural birds, but CORTf levels did not differ, nor were correlated to FIDs. Survival was twice as high in urban as in rural birds and links with CORTf varied between habitats: while a quadratic relationship supports stabilizing selection in urban birds, high predation rates may have masked CORTf-survival relationship in rural ones. These results evidence that urban life does not constitute an additional source of stress for urban individuals, as shown by their near identical CORTf values compared with rural conspecifics supporting the non-random distribution of individuals among habitats according to their behavioural phenotypes.