The adaptive significance of avian social organisations

The Social Organization of Tigers (Panthera Tigris) in Royal Chitawan National Park, Nepal

“…The limited data from this study support those of Crandall (1964), but it should be noted that most of the observations were on one female (103) who was coming into heat for the first time. For tigress 103, the interval between bouts of roaring (Schaller, 1967:258) and/or visits by an adult male, which were used as indicators of a heat period, was monitored from mid-October 1975 to mid-April 1976.…”

“…Where ungulates are concentrated around a few large, permanent water holes, leopards have relatively small, mutually exclusive ranges, and their intraspecific spacing system effectively limits their density (Muckenhirn and Eisenberg, 1973). The effect of fluctuations in availability and distribution of limited resources on temporal and spatial utilization patterns has also been suggested or demonstrated in a variety of birds and mammals (Crook, 1965;Brown and Orians, 1970;Gill and Wolf, 1975;Waser, 1976;Clutton-Brock and Harvey, 1977). The dispersion of resources in relation to the spatial system of tigers is considered in more detail in the section "Home Ranges.…”

Observation of Daytime Sleep-like Behavior in a Migratory Songbird during Stopover

“…Despite the important roles of foraging and diet plasticity during passage (Graber and Graber 1983, Loria and Moore 1990, Martin and Karr 1990, Parrish 2000, Wang and Moore 2005, omnivorous migrants use patchily distributed, locally abundant resources such as fruits, nectar, and seeds, whereas strictly insectivorous migrants feed only on insect prey, which is often more evenly distributed (Chernetsov 2012). These two types of resource present migrants with different economic decisions (Brown 1964, Crook 1965. The importance of extra eyes in finding patchily distributed food and the difficulty of monopolizing this food should promote social foraging and the long-term use of social information in omnivores (Greenberg and Salewski 2005).…”

Spatial and temporal unpredictability of colony size in Cliff Swallows across 30 years

“…Many species of colonial birds, for example, breed in colonies ranging from only a few pairs to thousands of individuals at a single site (Crook 1965, Brown et al 1990. From the first studies on the costs and benefits of coloniality (Lubin 1974, Hoogland and Sherman 1976, Snapp 1976, Veen 1977, Hoogland 1979) to more recent work on genetic influences on sociality (Brown and Brown 2000a, Møller 2002, Serrano and Tella 2007, Spottiswoode 2009), colony size has emerged in many cases as either a key determinant of fitness or an indicator of local resource availability, breeding-site quality, or the phenotypic composition of groups (Wittenberger and Hunt 1985, Siegel-Causey and Kharitonov 1990, Danchin and Wagner 1997, Brown and Brown 2001.…”