Quantitative analysis of the orientation of white stork nestlings’ parents from video monitoring

Abstract

Video-monitoring has become in the last decades common practice for animal observation and conservation purposes. In Ornithology, it is mostly used for tracking predators and nest surveillance, but, with the rapid development and spreading of webcams on nests for educational purposes, new opportunities arise for behavioral investigation, through citizen science for instance. In this article, we use video-monitoring from a public webcam on a White stork (Ciconia ciconia) nest and perform systematic image analysis to record the positioning and orientation of the guarding parent on the nest, during the nestling period over 60 days. From this data of 450 orientation samples, correlations with weather parameters are drawn. Our results suggest that the sun is responsible for most of the orientation with an hourly dependence, while the wind has prevalence during rainy days. A change in the parent behavior is also observed around the time the nestlings are known to attain their maximal weight. These preliminary findings provide new insights on weather influence on parental care behavior likely linked with the parent's sensing. The versatility of the proposed method allows for behavioral studies on a wide variety of species.