Feeding Ecology of Great Tits (Parus major) and Blue Tits (Parus caeruleus), Breeding in Suburban Gardens

Cowie, Richard J.; Hinsley, Shelley A.

doi:10.2307/4928

Cited by 136 publications

(129 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Toms 2003). However, several recent studies looking specifically at this issue have found that a variety of species (including suburban Australian Magpies, British tits and Scrub Jays (Aphelocoma coerulescens) (Cowie and Hinsley 1988;Fleischer et al 2003;O'Leary and Jones 2006)), all with easy access to anthropogenic foods, used only small proportions of this food, but especially so when feeding their chicks. Most impressive of all, a population of North American Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) studied over several harsh winters in Maine showed no dependency on feeders and survived even when the feeders were suddenly withdrawn (Brittingham and Temple 1992).…”

Section: Feeding Really Does Change Thingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the northern hemisphere numerous surveys of participation rates have found 34-75% of households in the USA and UK were engaged in the practice (Cowie and Hinsley 1988;Rogers 2002;US Fish & Wildlife Service 2002). This activity is explicitly endorsed by organisations such as the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO), who actively promote feeding as a 'positive investment in the survival of our birds' (e.g.…”

Section: Wild-bird Feeding: Here and Therementioning

confidence: 99%

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An appetite for connection: why we need to understand the effect and value of feeding wild birds

Jones

2011

Emu - Austral Ornithology

107

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Section: Feeding Really Does Change Thingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wild-bird Feeding: Here and Therementioning

confidence: 99%

An appetite for connection: why we need to understand the effect and value of feeding wild birds

Jones

2011

Emu - Austral Ornithology

107

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“…Even those species that are able to adapt to urban environments show striking differences from populations in natural habitats in many aspects of their ecology (e.g. Cowie and Hinsley 1988;Hõrak 1993;Chace and Walsh 2006;Chamberlain et al 2009). Generalist species are better able to exploit urban environments (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trends in bird species richness, abundance and biomass along a tropical urbanization gradient

et al. 2016

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AcknowledgementsWe thank Lilian Twanza and Osman Mwebe, who also took part in some of the bird counts in Kampala, and to NatureUganda for data from the rural sites. We are also grateful to L. Bennun, J. Roberts, P. Robinson and J. Pierini for providing personal observations on scavenger populations in African cities, and to an anonymous referee whose constructive comments improved the manuscript. 3Abstract Impacts of urbanization on biodiversity are commonly studied using urbanization gradients which provide a space-for-time substitution in estimating consequences of urban expansion. Rates of urbanization and human population growth are high in tropical countries of the developing world, which also hold most of the world's biodiversity hot-spots, yet few studies have considered biodiversity trends along urban gradients in these regions. Bird communities across a gradient of nine sites in Uganda, from the city centre of Kampala to outlying rural locations, were studied over a six year period. These sites were ordered along an urbanization gradient using Principle Components Analysis based on habitat variables estimated at each site. Bird species richness showed a decrease from rural to urban sites, a trend especially evident in forest birds. There was no clear pattern in total abundance, total biomass or biomass per individual along the gradient. However, this latter result was heavily influenced by a colony of Marabou Storks at one site.When this species was omitted, there was evidence of a positive trend with urbanization, showing that as species richness decreased, the bird community was increasingly dominated by larger species with increasing urbanization, which were mainly scavengers able to exploit human refuse. These results provide further support for the negative impacts of urbanization on species richness, but also demonstrate trends in abundance and biomass are variable across different regions. In particular, the increasing dominance of larger species in urban areas may be relevant to certain geographic and/or socioeconomic contexts.

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“…The absence of a relationship between Winter Wren density and feeder density suggests that the relationships for Blackbird, House Sparrow, and Starling were not being driven simply by variation in some other component of the urban landscape. Somewhat surprisingly, though, feeder density did not predict the abundance of Blue Tit and Great Tit, both species that feed commonly on garden bird feeders, including during the breeding season (Cowie and Hinsley 1988b). However, populations of both of these hole-nesting species are relatively stable in urban environments , and there is no reason to suppose that their populations are especially food limited within UK cities.…”

Section: Socioeconomic Correlates Of Bird Feedingmentioning

confidence: 88%

Interactions between People and Birds in Urban Landscapes

Fuller¹,

Irvine²,

Davies³

et al. 2012

Urban Bird Ecology and Conservation

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Abstract. A large body of work over the past few decades has revealed the manifestly dramatic impacts of urbanization on species' distributions and ecologies, many of which result from gross changes in land use and configuration. Less well understood are the rather more direct interactions between people and biodiversity in the urban arena. While there is a general concern that urbanization impoverishes human contact with nature, daily interaction with biodiversity in urban greenspaces and the widespread provision of food and nesting resources for wildlife form a part of many city-dwellers' experience. Using data from the UK, we show that supplementary resource provision aimed explicitly at enhancing avian populations can result in high levels of additional foraging and nesting opportunities, particularly in urban areas. However, our data also indicate that levels of such resource provision are strongly positively correlated with human population density at a regional scale, and within a large city. The proportion of households participating in bird feeding depends on social and economic features of the human population, suggesting that strong covariation between human and ecological communities will result. Indeed, we demonstrate that the abundances of some urban-adapted bird species are positively related to the density of feeding stations across the urban landscape, although such relationships were not apparent for other species that commonly use garden feeding stations. It has been suggested that interactions with nature, such as feeding birds, could have beneficial consequences for human health. A better understanding of this potential feedback is required.

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Feeding Ecology of Great Tits (Parus major) and Blue Tits (Parus caeruleus), Breeding in Suburban Gardens

Cited by 136 publications

References 14 publications

An appetite for connection: why we need to understand the effect and value of feeding wild birds

An appetite for connection: why we need to understand the effect and value of feeding wild birds

Trends in bird species richness, abundance and biomass along a tropical urbanization gradient

Interactions between People and Birds in Urban Landscapes

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