Bat predation on birds is a very rare phenomenon in nature. Most documented reports of bird-eating bats refer to tropical bats that occasionally capture resting birds. Millions of small birds concentrate and cross over the world's temperate regions during migration, mainly at night, but no nocturnal predators are known to benefit from this enormous food resource. An analysis of 14,000 fecal pel...

To what degree is niche partitioning driven by underlying patterns in resources such as food, rather than competition itself? Do discrete niches exist? We address these questions the context of Cooper's and sharp-shinned hawks, two broadly sympatric, North American, bird-eating raptors genus Accipiter. find that resource base, quantified body masses birds at bird feeders, approximately lognorma...

Although tropical forest birds are known to prey upon small lizards and frogs, no study has documented the attributes of vertebrate-eating birds or whether birds prey opportunistically on the different elements of the herpetofauna within tropical communities. This study is based on a 14-mo investigation on avian diet, supplemented with a 3-y census of frogs and a 1-y census of lizards in a humi...

New Zealand has four rodent species, the ship rat (Rattus rattus L.), Norway rat (R. norvegicus Berkenhout), kiore (or Polynesian rat, R. exulans Peale) and the house mouse (Mus musculus L.), all of which have been introduced. Their presence has implications for conservation management as they prey on native bird (Bell, 1978; King, 1984), reptile (Whitaker, 1978) and invertebrate (Ramsey, 1978;...

A consideration of the composition of bird diets, and the list of bird species found deadl indicates that most New Zealand land bird species risk being killed by feeding directly on baits poisoned with Compound 1080 or by eating poisoned prey. Theoretically, if a population of a species is heavily reduced, its ability, or inability, to recover can be predicted from a consideration of its reprod...

Brushtail possums (Trichosurus vulpecula Kerr) have been identified as predators of adult birds, eggs and chicks. A captive possum caught and partially ate a house sparrow (Passer domesticus L.) (Morgan, 1981), and time-lapse video photography recorded wild possums eating kokako (Callaeas cinerea wilsoni Gmelin) eggs (Brown, Innes and Shorten, 1993) and chicks (Innes, Crook and Jansen, 1994). A...

We studied the populations of four seed-eating bird species throughout winter during a 30-year study in forests Tatarstan Republic, Russia. Numbers all fluctuated from year-to-year by several orders magnitude but with significant underlying trend for increased numbers associated rising temperatures and greater food supply. question whether traditional view that such birds move further south onl...

Severe feather-pecking (SFP) persists as a highly prevalent and detrimental behavioural problem in laying hens (Gallus gallus domesticus) worldwide. The present experiment investigated the association between feather-eating and plumage damage, a consequence of SFP, in groups of free-range, ISA Brown laying hens. Single feathers were placed on the floor of the home pens. Feathers were sourced fr...

Fire is an integral part of savanna ecology and changes in fire patterns are linked to biodiversity loss in savannas worldwide. In Australia, changed fire regimes are implicated in the contemporary declines of small mammals, riparian species, obligate-seeding plants and grass seed-eating birds. Translating this knowledge into management to recover threatened species has proved elusive. We repor...

night eating syndrome is a common disorder in eating behaviors that occurs in close relation to the night time sleep cycle. although eating disorders are common in society, night eating syndrome has been left neglected by health care professionals. in this report we present a case of eating disorder that exhibits some novel features of night eating syndrome. our case was a progressed type of ea...