Social cues facilitate habitat selection: American redstarts establish breeding territories in response to song

Abstract

For migratory songbirds nesting in northern temperate forests, a short breeding season demands that males rapidly establish territories. Because critical insect and vegetation resources are unavailable during spring arrival, we suggest that conspecifics serve as settlement cues for males new to a local population. To test conspecific attraction, we conducted playback experiments with American redstarts Setophaga ruticilla. Experimental results demonstrate that song playbacks strongly attract conspecifics, recruiting an average of 4.2 additional males per plot; adult males new to our sites increased, while yearling males failed to respond. Yearlings arrived 6 to 10 days later than adults, raising the possibility that yearlings responded to songs of early arriving adults rather than to playbacks. Our work indicates that conspecific attraction is an important mechanism for breeding habitat selection in an established population of a migratory forest songbird, but the effect is moderated by age, reproductive experience and arrival timing.

Social information in nest colonisation and occupancy in a long-lived, solitary breeding bird

“…bird settlement in a patch. At the between-patch scale, attraction of individuals could be accomplished by the use of decoys and adult song playback (Ward and Schlossberg 2004;Hahn and Silverman 2006). However, the recruitment of the birds to the patch would require that prospecting birds can gather additional information about conspecific breeding performance, e.g.…”

Using conspecific broadcast for Willow Flycatcher restoration

“…Much like other songbirds with a tendency for conspecific attraction, Willow Flycatchers in California have exceptionally short breeding seasons, lasting less than three months (Sedgwick 2000); Willow Flycatcher territories are often clustered within larger habitat patches (Walkinshaw 1966); and polygyny is observed when population densities are sufficiently high (Prescott 1986, Hahn and Silverman 2006, Mathewson et al 2013, Kus et al 2017. For these reasons, providing social cues at restored…”

“…Some territorial passerine species are known to rely on social cues such as the presence of conspecifics' songs to assess the quality of possible breeding habitat and are reluctant to establish territories where conspecifics are not present (Muller et al 1997, Ward and Schlossberg 2004, Andrews et al 2015. For many species, especially those with short breeding seasons, the presence of other members of their species might be used as an indirect way for naïve individuals to infer habitat quality and quickly find a suitable territory without investing substantial time (Hahn and Silverman 2006). Settling near conspecifics also may also help improve birds' fitness by providing opportunities for extra-pair mating and occasionally permitting polygyny (Ahlering et al 2010).…”

Reducing cuckoo parasitism risk via informed habitat choices

“…However, taking into account the scale of our experiment (average patch size ¼ 8 ha), any such effects are most likely negligible-and probably far weaker than the potential effects of, for example, heterospecific attraction or avoidance had the playback control been used instead of the silent control (for similar arguments, see Farrell et al 2012, Hua et al 2013. Similar experimental designs using silent controls have been applied extensively in studies of avian habitat selection (e.g., Hahn and Silverman 2006, Farrell et al 2012, Hua et al 2013, Ware et al 2015. Nonetheless, if the increased vocal activity due to the playback-or the mere presence of a playback machinerepels birds, one could expect a consistent negative effect on bird abundance across sites and species, irrespective of the latter's status as cuckoo hosts.…”