Category: Projects

Partners: Devon Wildlife Trust, in a partnership with Dartmoor National Park Authority, Exmoor National Park Authority, Forestry England, National Trust, Somerset Wildlife Trust and Woodland Trust.

Funding: The National Lottery Heritage Fund

Summary: The Two Moors Pine Marten Project sought advice from PiedFly.Net to investigate the mitigation of potential negative impact of Pine martens on Pied flycatchers. Although nestbox modifications, well used across continental Europe, reduce predation by Pine martens, there is concern that modified nestbox designs may reduce occupancy by Pied flycatchers. Before advocating change across a large area for an important regional population PiedFly.Net:

-estimated the importance of nestboxes for the Southwest England Pied flycatcher population.

-experimentally tested nestbox design influence on hole-nesting bird occupancy.

For more information on the Two Moors Pine Marten Project see here.

Lead: Dr Antica Culina, Netherlands Institute of Ecology

Funding: Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, NIOO-KNAW, Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics (NTNU, Trondheim), NLBIF, and CEFE CNRS (Montpellier).

Summary: SPI-Birds is a network of researchers who collect data on breeding, individually marked birds. The SPI-Birds Network hosts breeding data from over 175 breeding populations of individually marked birds, in the original format as stored by researchers and in a SPI-Birds standardised data format that has been developed within the community (see here). The SPI-Birds team creates tailored R code pipelines to convert any data format into the standard one. This quality checks the data to correct for any mistakes, and warns the users about potential issues when using the data, acting as a central contact point for researchers to access data.

As well as helping the development of SPI-Birds, PiedFly.Net are using it as a safe and secure way of storing and utilising the datasets we hold, and to make large efficiencies in the way our data is managed and added to each year. The first of our datasets are now available through the SPI-Birds database.

For more information see here and this paper: Connected data landscape of long-term ecological studies: the SPI-Birds data hub (2021) A Culina, F Adriaensen, L Bailey, M Burgess, A Charmantier, E Cole, et al. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13388

Lead: Dr David Wheatcroft, Uppsala University

Summary: Both Pied and Collared Flycatcher nestlings discriminate against the songs of the other species in a mixed-species population in Sweden. This discrimination has a largely genetic basis, which is suggested to maintain species differences in songs across species by biasing what juveniles learn. This project will determine whether co-occurrence with other species drives stronger discrimination in juveniles by collaborating with researchers across Europe, including PiedFly.Net, to evaluate song discrimination in nestlings in multiple locations. This study aims to determine the causes of geographic variation in song discrimination in flycatchers. In addition to information on responses to songs, video recordings of nestling behaviour capture begging calls, begging rates (before and during playback) and begging interactions among nestlings.

Funders: Woodland Trust, Heritage Lottery Fund, Natural England

Summary: We know spring temperature plays an important role in determining the timing of breeding of insectivorous woodland birds; invertebrate emergence and abundance is strongly linked to spring temperature. This project has created a fine scale temperature heat-map of East Dartmoor NNR so we can examine this in more detail. We might expect warmer territories to be occupied first, and to initiate breeding earlier. The temperature data has also contributed to a Heritage Lottery Project on Barbastelle bats; the temperature data was combined with radio tracking movement data to look at how temperature influences foraging behaviour.

Please see our paper from this work here: https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.09171

Partners: University of Exeter, University of Edinburgh, British Trust for Ornithology, Ken Smith

Summary: Some animals can adapt to climatic change by altering timing of spring migration or emergence and the onset of breeding. In some species this has been shown to cause a mismatch between consumers (birds) and prey (caterpillars), when phenological changes differ between species. At the scale of Britain we are involved in various analyses investigating spatial variation in caterpillar availability (prey) and bird (predator) breeding parameters in relation to climate and its population consequences.

Partners: University of Exeter, British Trust for Ornithology, University of Groningen, RSPB Centre for Conservation Science, Swiss Ornithological Institute

Funders: Natural England, Devon Birds, British Ornithological Union

Summary: Using the latest advances in technology (geolocators) we are tracking Pied Flycatchers to determine migration timing, routes, strategies, stopover locations and sub-Saharan non-breeding locations. This is addressing fundamental gaps in our knowledge of the species and will guide further research across the flyway. We have discovered that UK breeding Pied Flycatchers spend the northern winter in a relatively small area of western Africa centred on Guinea/Sierra Leone/Liberia. This has led to new work studying Pied Flycatchers, carried out by the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science in partnership with the Liberian BirdLife Partner SCNL and the University of Exeter, in Liberia.

Partner: University of Exeter

Funder: Natural England

Summary: Changes in both woodland management practices and climate are implicated in observed population changes of many European woodland birds. The importance of woodland management and how this affects bird demographics is poorly understood. Using data from one long running nest box scheme (Yarner Wood) we investigate effects of woodland thinning and local weather on nest site occupation and breeding parameters for four hole-nesting birds; Blue Tit, Great Tit, Common Redstart and Pied Flycatcher.

Output: Burgess, M. D. (2014) Restoring abandoned coppice for birds: Few effects of conservation management on occupancy, fecundity and productivity of hole nesting birds. Forest Ecology and Management 330: 205-217