Social partners and temperature jointly affect morning foraging activity of small birds in winter

Daily foraging activity of small wintering birds is classically thought to be driven by the need to gather enough energy reserves to survive each night. A separate line of research has shown that sociality is a major driver in winter foraging activities in many species. Here, we used wintering birds as a study system to move toward an integrative understanding of the influence of energy requirements and sociality on foraging ecology. We used RFID-enabled feeders in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA in January–March 2019 to measure foraging activity in two species (downy woodpeckers, Dryobates pubescens, and white-breasted nuthatches, Sitta carolinensis). We analyzed the relationship between overnight temperature and morning foraging activity and found that lowest overnight temperature was weakly correlated with morning visitation at feeders. We then used a network approach to ask if flock associations explain similarity in birds’ foraging activity. In both species, individuals with stronger associations in a social network were more likely to share similar feeder activity, and an index of social partners’ activity explained foraging activity better than overnight temperature. This brings forth new questions about the interplay between individual response to temperature and social factors in shaping how small animals cope with harsh winter conditions

Loss of flockmates weakens winter site fidelity in golden-crowned sparrows (\u3ci\u3eZonotrichia atricapilla\u3c/i\u3e)

Animal social interactions have an intrinsic spatial basis as many of these interactions occur in spatial proximity. This presents a dilemma when determining causality: Do individuals interact socially because they happen to share space, or do they share space because they are socially linked? We present a method that uses demographic turnover events as a natural experiment to investigate the links between social associations and space use in the context of interannual winter site fidelity in a migratory bird. We previously found that golden-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia atricapilla) show consistent flocking relationships across years, and that familiarity between individuals influences the dynamics of social competition over resources. Using long-term data on winter social and spatial behavior across 10 y, we show that i) sparrows exhibit interannual fidelity to winter home ranges on the scale of tens of meters and ii) the precision of interannual site fidelity increases with the number of winters spent, but iii) this fidelity is weakened when sparrows lose close flockmates from the previous year. Furthermore, the effect of flockmate loss on site fidelity was higher for birds that had returned in more than 2 winters, suggesting that social fidelity may play an increasingly important role on spatial behavior across the lifetime of this migratory bird. Our study provides evidence that social relationships can influence site fidelity, and shows the potential of long-term studies for disentangling the relationship between social and spatial behavior

Strategies of protected area use by Asian elephants in relation to motivational state and social affiliations

Animals’ space requirements may vary according to life-history and social considerations. We observed 516 wild adult Asian elephants from both sexes, over 9 years, to investigate how life-history traits and social behavior influence protected-area (PA) use at Udawalawe National Park, Sri Lanka. Male PA-use, quantified in terms of average between-sightings-interval (BSI), was significantly influenced by the interaction of age class and motivational state (i.e. reproduction vs. foraging). Musth lengthened with age, with a median of 24.5 days for ages 21–30, 32.5 days for ages 31–40, and 45 days for those \u3e 40. A minority (11%) used it exclusively during musth, while others used it exclusively for foraging (44%) or both (45%). Males using it in both states and older musth-only males were more likely to be seen across years. There were 16 social communities containing between 2–22 adult females. Females’ BSI was significantly influenced by social ties, but this relationship was weak, because members of social communities do not necessarily disperse together, resulting in high individual variation in space-use. Inter-annual variability in sightings among individuals of both sexes indicates that around ¾ of the population is likely non-residential across years, challenging the prevailing fortress-conservation paradigm of wildlife management

Public Access for Pheasant Hunters: Understanding an Emerging Need

Ring‐necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus; i.e., pheasant) hunting participation is declining across North America, reflecting a larger downward trend in American hunting participation and threatening benefits to grassland conservation and rural economies. To stabilize and expand the pheasant hunting population, we must first identify factors that influence pheasant hunter participation. We used an extensive in‐person hunter survey to test the hypothesis that hunter demographics interact with social‐ecological traits of hunting locations to affect hunter decisions, outcomes, and perceptions. We built a series of Bayesian mixed effects models to parse variation in demographics, perceptions, and hunt outcomes of pheasant hunters interviewed at public access hunting sites across 3 regions in Nebraska, USA, that varied in pheasant abundance and proximity to urban population centers. Among pheasant hunters in Nebraska, access to private lands was negatively related to the human population density of a pheasant hunter’s home ZIP code and the distance a hunter had traveled to reach a hunting location. Pheasant hunters interviewed closer to metropolitan areas tended to be more urban and travel shorter distances, and their parties were more likely to include youth but less likely to include dogs. Hunter satisfaction was positively associated with seeing and harvesting pheasants and hunting with youth. Whereas youth participation and the number of pheasants seen varied by study region, hunter satisfaction did not differ across regions, suggesting that hunters may calibrate their expectations and build their parties based on where they plan to hunt. The variation in hunter demographics across hunting locations and disconnects between social and ecological correlates of hunter satisfaction suggests that diverse pheasant hunting constituencies will be best served by diverse pheasant hunting opportunities

Multi-messenger searches via IceCube’s high-energy neutrinos and gravitational-wave detections of LIGO/Virgo

We summarize initial results for high-energy neutrino counterpart searches coinciding with gravitational-wave events in LIGO/Virgo\u27s GWTC-2 catalog using IceCube\u27s neutrino triggers. We did not find any statistically significant high-energy neutrino counterpart and derived upper limits on the time-integrated neutrino emission on Earth as well as the isotropic equivalent energy emitted in high-energy neutrinos for each event