Thermal patterns constrain diurnal behavior of a ground-dwelling bird

By J. Carroll, Craig A. Davis, R. D. Elmore, S. Fuhlendorf, E. Thacker. 2015

87 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, gaining knowledge about thermal refuges for vulnerable species has been a major focal point of ecological studies, and this focus has been heightened by predicted temperature increases associated with global climate change. To better understand how organisms respond to thermal landscapes and extremes, we investigated the thermal ecology of a gallinaceous bird species (northern bobwhite; Colinus virginianus, hereafter bobwhite) during a key life history period. Specifically, our study focused on the brood-rearing period of precocial bobwhite chicks associated with brood-attending adults. We measured site-specific black bulb temperatures (Tbb) and vegetation characteristics across 38 brood tracking days and 68 random landscape sites to assess thermal patterns at scales relevant to broods. We observed that the landscape was thermally heterogeneous, exhibiting variation in Tbb up to 40°C during peak diurnal heating demonstrating a wide array of thermal choices available to broods. At 15:00 h, broods...

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b7ac050d7c7a0c771716cd5d1ecba79a4249ed8