NOTES ON THE NEST AND BREEDING OF GOELDI’S ANTBIRD (AKLETOS GOELDII), A BAMBOO SPECIALIST, FROM UCAYALI, PERU

Abstract: On 02 September 2018 we found a nest of Goeldi’s Antbird (Akletos goeldii) in a patch of Guadua bamboo. During the next week, we made regular observations of this nest, obtaining video and photographs of the nest structure, eggs, nestlings, and parental care behaviors. These data clarify previous discrepancies in reports of nest architecture for A. goeldii and deepen our knowledge of the breeding biology of this species

Description of the nest of two Thamnophilidae species in Brazilian Amazon

Many Thamnophilidae species have poorly known breeding. Here we describe the nests and eggs of two species, Epinecrophylla ornata from a terra firme forest, and Myrmotherula assimilis from a flooded forest in Brazil. Knowledge on the natural history of these species is important for future conservation strategies

Description of the nest of two Thamnophilidae species in Brazilian Amazon

Many Thamnophilidae species have poorly known breeding. Here we describe the nests and eggs of two species, Epinecrophylla ornata from a terra firme forest, and Myrmotherula assimilis from a flooded forest in Brazil. Knowledge on the natural history of these species is important for future conservation strategies. © 2016, Sociedade Brasileira de Ornitologia. All rights reserved

Evolution of nest architecture in tyrant flycatchers and allies

This study was funded by Princeton University, a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering (to M.C.S.), AFOSR FA9550-20-1-0161 (to M.C.S.), Eric and Wendy Schmidt by recommendation of the Schmidt Futures Polymaths program (to M.C.S.), and European Research Council Advanced Grant 788203. Acknowledgements We would like to thank Karina Vanadzina for sharing unpublished life-history data and Maria Camila León for providing original artwork. Maria E. Mendiwelso Moreno helped to gather information from the literature for some species and Gates Dupont provided insights about statistical analysis in the earliest stages of the project. Mark Mainwaring and two reviewers provided very insightful comments that have improved our manuscript. Photographs were obtained with permission from Daniel Field, Daniel Perrella, John and Milena Beer, Gustavo Londoño and Juan Felipe León. We are indebted to the many field biologists who described the nests of Tyrannida species.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A roadmap to identifying and filling shortfalls in Neotropical ornithology

Abstract Securing the long-term resilience of the world’s most speciose avifauna, that of the Neotropics, requires spatially and temporally explicit data to inform decisions. We examine gaps in our knowledge of the region’s avifauna through the lens of the biodiversity shortfall concept: the gaps between realized knowledge and complete knowledge. This framework serves as a useful tool to take stock of the last 25 yr of Neotropical ornithological work since the untimely death of Ted Parker. Here, we highlight 7 key shortfalls: taxonomy, distribution, abundance, evolutionary patterns, abiotic tolerances, species traits, and biotic interactions. We then propose an eighth—and new—“Parkerian” shortfall that reflects a lack of basic natural history knowledge key to understanding how species might respond to environmental challenges. Bridging this shortfall will help reverse declines by informing reintroduction, recovery network, and habitat restoration efforts. We discuss the challenges imposed by each shortfall and how strategies such as citizen-science initiatives and technological advances can either remedy or mitigate the uncertainty they generate

Human Alteration of a Neotropical Landscape Drives Long-term Changes in its Forest Bird Communities

Human alteration of natural landscapes leads to biodiversity loss, often from a combination of area effects and fragmentation effects. Smaller habitat patches support fewer species than large ones and incur additional consequences from isolation. Efforts to preempt biodiversity loss from insular habitat fragments are complicated by individualistic species responses and time-delayed extinctions. Understanding how human activity affects bird communities in species rich, disturbance sensitive tropical forests is a conservation priority. Nevertheless, tropical ecosystems remain under-studied; long-term species inventory data from tropical forests are rare. This dissertation combines a unique set of spatially extensive avian inventories from lowland forests in central Panama with a long history of bird surveys from Barro Colorado Island (BCI), a well-studied land-bridge island isolated within the Panama Canal, to better inform our understanding of how human-altered environments drive long-term changes in tropical forest bird communities. First, I evaluated trait predictors of species extinctions from BCI. I assessed to what degree changes in BCI’s bird community can be explained by loss of species sensitive to fragmentation-associated environmental drying. In my second data chapter, I examined the pattern of delayed extinctions on BCI among different species groups. I used species-area models and extinction trends to predict how many species BCI might still lose and how long these remaining species losses could take. Lastly, I focused on lowland forest patches within the Canal zone to evaluate how increasing urbanization influences the use of forest patches by tropical birds, with a focus on species composition, traits, and phylogenetic diversity. Birds are likely to have disappeared from BCI if they had small populations in the 1920s, specialize on terrestrial arthropods, and are sensitive to forest moisture conditions. As a consequence of extreme, persistent declines among understory insectivores associated with wet forests, the bird community on BCI has significantly shifted to resemble forest bird communities on the drier portion of the rainfall gradient. Extinctions accelerated 40-60 years following isolation and the island no longer supports the number of species expected for its size and amount of annual precipitation. From six to 92 additional species may be lost from BCI over the next one to nine centuries. Enduring species losses on BCI appear to be a product of habitat loss, edge effects, and negative consequences of isolation for dispersal-limited birds. In lowland forests of the Canal zone, urbanization is associated with community simplification and decreased compositional similarity without subsequent loss of functional diversity. Urban forests broadly favor good dispersers with short development periods, and recent evolutionary histories. My results reveal the important roles of connectivity, dispersal ability, and sensitivity to local habitat conditions structuring avian community composition in tropical forests of central Panama. Limited human activity and access to large, protected forest tracts appear to be key drivers of avian community composition for both BCI and urban forest fragments. Dispersal-limited tropical birds with small populations, especially habitat specialists sensitive to moisture conditions and human disturbance, may be at greatest risk of extinction in insular rainforest fragments