0000000000776050
AUTHOR
Campobello D.
Editorial: Mind the (gender) gap: Prospects and strategies for women's career in ornithology
On a small island, someone is patiently looking at the ocean, waiting for the shearwaters to come back to their nests, the hair blown by a gentle breeze, a laptop full of notes open on the legs. On the other side of the globe, perched on a high ladder, a scientist is checking a Pygmy Owl nest box. A cautious song breaks the stillness of the morning: spring is coming and soon the taiga will be alive with breeding activities. In a small lab, under a buzzing lamp, a young researcher is hunched over a pile of ancient bird bones. Each one echoes past stories of changing climate, warning us about the future. A lonely figure stands against a hazy sky, meditating on the battles won and those still …
Avian brood parasitism in Italy: Another perspective
We present a quantitative analysis of the data reported in the only published review of parasitism frequency on hosts of Common Cuckoo Cuculus canorus in a Mediterranean area. We first eliminated a bias potentially introduced by the method by which data were recorded. Of the initial potential 70 species parasitized in Italy, only 44 were confirmed as host species, of which only 10 species had more than 10% of their total nests parasitized. We highlighted differential parasitism on host species according to geographic area, but the analysis suggested results were strongly biased because nest location was generally not reported and the number of records steeply decreased from North to South.
Reed Warbler Hosts Do Not Fine-Tune Mobbing Defenses During the Breeding Season, Even When Cuckoos Are Rare
Hosts of brood parasitic cuckoos often employ mobbing attacks to defend their nests and, when mobbing is costly, hosts are predicted to adjust their mobbing to match parasitism risk. While evidence exists for fine-tuned plasticity, it remains unclear why mobbing does not track larger seasonal changes in parasitism risk. Here we test a possible explanation from parental investment theory: parents should defend their current brood more intensively as the opportunity to replace it declines (re-nesting potential), and therefore “counteract” any apparent seasonal decline to match parasitism risk. We take advantage of mobbing experiments conducted at two sites where reed warblers (Acrocephalus sc…