0000000000464832
AUTHOR
Simo Jokinen
Food Caching By Willow and Crested Tits: A Test of Scatterhoarding Models
In coniferous forests of Central Finland, Willow (Parus montanus) and Crest- ed Tits (P. cristatus) store seeds in a scattered distribution within their territory during the autumn. Individuals cache and recover food items while moving together as members of mixed-species flocks. The purpose of this study was to test certain predictions of scatter- hoarding models (Stapanian and Smith 1978, Clarkson et al. 1986), which predict how the animal should hoard food items from a superabundant source to maximize the number of caches recovered. Our field experiments gave support to most of the predictions of the models. Individual tits stored seeds closer to the food source when food had been availa…
Biogeographical comparison of winter bird assemblages in urban environments in Finland
We studied biogeographical variation of urban bird assemblages in Finland. Winter birds were censused by single-visit study plot method from thirty-one centres of villages or towns along 950 km latitudinal extent. A total twenty-eight bird species was observed and the average density was 61.2 ind./10 ha. The number of dominant species in study areas varied between two and seven and their proportion of the whole assemblage was over 70%. Species richness, but not the density of birds, decreased northwards in pooled data. Higher species richness in south than in north was mainly due to the higher amount of delayed migratory birds (e.g. waterbirds, finches) and southerly distributed bird specie…