Rooks (Corvus frugilegus) are colonially breeding corvids found in most agricultural landscapes. Colonies in the County Durham area tend to be clustered at distances up to 500 m, but otherwise show little pattern in terms of spacing or size. Colony size was comparable between sites as changes in colony nest counts were allowed to stabilise before the whole area was surveyed. When measuring nest build-up at a sample of colonies in 1996, no further significant increases occurred after 9th April. The spatial size distribution of colonies was maintained between years. The distribution and size of breeding colonies is modelled in relation to the interaction between the spatial distribution of the foraging habitat and potential intraspecific competitors, with the identification of the distance over which this interaction is strongest. The satellite derived habitat data used for the modelling were part of the ITE Land Cover Map of Great Britain. However, their correspondence with ground reference data was found to be severely lacking. Thus, for modelling the availability of nesting habitat, OS woodland data were used as these identified more of the extant rookery sites, whilst the ITE data were retained for quantifying the foraging habitat. Logistic regression showed that the distribution of colony sites was influenced by the availability of woodland blocks large enough to hold a colony, proximity to roads and buildings, and by the amount of pasture within 1 km. Other suitable sites with these characteristics remained unoccupied within the distribution. Partial Correlations showed that interactions between the spatial distribution of the foraging habitat and competitors influenced colony size at distances up to 6 km, suggesting their effect outside of the breeding season. The multiple regression model built with variable values for this distance explained 31% of the variance in colony size. When applied to the potential breeding sites identified using the logistic regression, most sites still remained suitable. This suggests the distribution is not saturated and that limited availability of breeding habitat is not the cause of the nesting aggregations. The broad correlation of Rook abundance to foraging habitat and potential competitors corresponds to an ideal free distribution of individuals across colony sites. This is supported by models of Rook numbers in relation to parish agricultural statistics produced by MAFF. These again show the importance of pasture as a probable foraging resource, and how pasture quality could be important to Rook numbers. The models also supported the ideal free predictions of spatial variation in Rook abundance in relation to habitat, and the response of colony sizes to temporal change in habitat quality.

Of all anthropogenic pressures, urbanisation is one of the most damaging, and is expanding in its influence throughout the world. In Australia, 90% of the human population live in urban centres along the eastern seaboard. Before European settlement in the early 1800s, much of the Australia's East coast was dominated by forests. Many of the forest dependent fauna have had to adapt to forest fragmentation and habitat loss resulting from clearing for urbanisation. However, relatively few studies have investigated the impact of urbanisation on biodiversity. This is especially true for the remaining fauna in large metropolitan areas, such as Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The physical and conceptual context of this thesis is the increasing impact of urbanisation and the potentially threatening factors to forest dependent fauna. Bats were selected because they comprise a third of Australia's mammal species, and therefore form a major component of Australia's biodiversity. Very little is known about the ecology and conservation biology of hollow-dependent bats in general, but particularly in urban environments. The study was conducted in Brisbane, south-east Queensland, one of Australia's most biodiverse regions. More than a third of Australia's bat species occur in this region. A large insectivorous bat, the white-striped freetail bat (Tadarida australis), was selected to study two key resources in this urban area - hollow availability and foraging habitat. This thesis also examined if artificial roost habitat could provide temporary roosts for white-striped freetail bats and other insectivorous bats and assessed whether these bat boxes can be used as a conservation tool in urban environments where natural hollow-availability is limited. The white-striped freetail bat is an obligate hollow-dweller and roosted largely in hollows of old or dead eucalypts throughout Brisbane's urban matrix. These roost trees harboured significantly more additional hollow-dependent species compared to control trees of similar age, height, and tree diameter. Roost cavities inside trees often exceeded 30 cm in diameter. Furthermore, maternity colonies used cavities of hollow trunks, which often extended into major branches, to roost in big numbers. Therefore artificial alternatives, such as small bat boxes, may provide temporary shelter for small roosting groups, but are unlikely to be suitable substitutes for habitat loss. Although five bat species used bat boxes during this study, the white-striped freetail bat was not attracted into bat boxes. Roost-switching behaviour was then used to quantify associations between individual white-striped freetail bats of a roosting group. Despite differences in gender and reproductive seasons, the bats exhibited the same behaviour throughout three radio-telemetry periods and over 500 bat-days of radio-tracking: each roosted in separate roosts, switched roosts very infrequently, and associated with other tagged bats only at a communal roost. Furthermore, the communal roost exhibited a hub of socialising between members of the roosting group especially at night, with vocalisation and swarming behaviour not found at any of the other roosts. Despite being spread over a large geographic area (up to 200 km2), each roost was connected to others by less than three links. One roost (the communal roost) defined the architecture of the network because it had the most links. That the network showed scale-free properties has profound implications for the management of the habitat trees of this roosting group. Scale-free networks provide high tolerance against stochastic events such as random roost removals, but are susceptible to the selective removal of hub nodes, such as the communal roost. The white-striped freetail bat flew at high speed and covered large distances in search for food. It foraged over all land-cover types found in Brisbane. However, its observed foraging behaviour was non-random with respect to both spatial location and the nature of the ground-level habitat. The main feeding areas were within three kilometers of the communal roost, predominantly over the Brisbane River flood plains. As the only mammal capable of flight, bats can forage above fragmented habitats. However, as this study showed, hollow-dependent insectivorous bats, including free-tailed bats, are specialised in their roosting requirements. The ongoing protection of hollow-bearing trees, and the ongoing recruitment of future hollow-bearing trees, is essential for the long-term conservation of these animals in highly fragmented landscapes. Furthermore, loss of foraging habitat is still poorly understood, and should be considered in the ongoing conservation of bats in urban environments.

Despite decades of protection, the endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) has failed to recover, primarily due to interactions with fishing gear and ship strikes. Right whales range along the U.S. east coast, foraging year round in the Gulf of Maine while a subset of the population travels to the South Atlantic Bight each year to calve. The habitat requirements of the right whale are poorly understood. I investigated the relationship between the distribution of right whales and physical oceanographic conditions in an effort to create predictive models of essential right whale habitats. Additionally, the distribution of right and humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) relative to fixed fishing gear was examined to assess spatio-temporal overlap. Habitat preferences were assessed using aerial survey data of whale locations and a range of topological and satellite derived physical parameters including bathymetry, sediment type, sea surface temperature, thermal gradients and surface roughness. A suite of non-parametric quantitative techniques including Mantel tests, log likelihood functions, Generalized Additive Models, Spearman Rank Correlations and the Williamson's spatial overlap index were used to assess relationships between whales and habitat variables. Our findings indicate that suitable calving habitat along the east coast may extend much farther to the north than is currently recognized. Our model correctly identified several well documented current and historic calving grounds in the eastern Atlantic but failed to fully identify a heavily used calving area off Argentina, which is characterized by lower surface water temperatures than the other calving regions. In the Gulf of Maine, right whale distribution was correlated primarily with sea surface temperature, sediment type and bathymetry. Predictive models offered insights into right whale habitat preferences for foraging but failed to wholly capture the physical factors underlying right whale distribution. I found the relative density of right and humpback whales and fixed fishing gear in the Gulf of Maine to be negatively correlated in most seasons and areas. These findings demonstrate that the regular co-occurrence of high densities of whales and gear is not a prerequisite for entanglement. Prohibiting entangling lines in areas where whales are known to forage could substantively reduce entanglement. / Dissertation

<p>Oceanographic features, such as fronts, eddies, and upwellings, provide important foraging areas for marine predators. These areas serve as important "hotspots" of marine life, by aggregating weakly swimming lower and mid-trophic level species which, in turn, attract foraging predators. Despite the importance of these dynamic features, we lack a comprehensive understanding of how they create foraging habitat for seabirds and other marine predators. In the first part of this dissertation, I review current knowledge of how seabirds use oceanographic features with an emphasis on developing a more mechanistic understanding of these features, and identify important considerations for future studies. I use the findings of this review to inform two field research projects in the Bay of Fundy, Canada and Onslow Bay, North Carolina. In these two projects, I examined seabird abundance and distribution in relation to oceanographic features that occur at different spatial and temporal scales. In the first project, I examined foraging habitat of red-necked phalaropes (<italic>Phalaropus lobatus</italic>) in relation fine-scale tidal forcing near the Brier Island ledges in the Bay of Fundy. This research demonstrated the importance of biophysical interactions in creating phalarope habitat, and characterized red-necked phalarope habitat in both space and time. In Onslow Bay, I investigated the effects of Gulf Stream fronts and eddies on the abundance and distribution of seabirds using both remotely sensed and in situ data. I used fisheries acoustics surveys to investigate prey distribution within Gulf Stream frontal eddies. I then developed habitat models for the six most commonly sighted species or species groups (Cory's shearwaters, <italic>Calonectris diomedea</italic>; greater shearwaters (<italic>Puffinus gravis</italic>; Wilson's storm petrel, <italic>Oceanites oceanicus</italic>; Audubon's shearwaters, <italic>Puffinus lherminieri</italic>; black-capped petrels, <italic>Pterodrama hasitata</italic>; and red and red-necked phalaropes, grouped together as <italic>Phalaropus</italic> spp.) using multivariate modeling techniques. Gulf Stream frontal eddies influenced the abundance and distribution of seabirds in Onslow Bay, although frontal features were not as important in predicting seabird habitat as demonstrated in previous studies in the South Atlantic Bight. Prey availability in Gulf Stream frontal eddies was highest in eddy cold core regions, particularly in those regions close to the Gulf Stream. Taken together, the results of my dissertation: underscore the importance of conducting standardized surveys to assess dynamic environmental variables; demonstrate the use of multivariate methods to examine seabird foraging in relation to oceanographic features; emphasize the need to evaluate both prey distributions and physical regimes within oceanographic features at depth; and highlight the importance of temporal aspects of oceanographic features, such as the persistence and age of the features, when assessing the role that these features play in creating seabird foraging habitat.</p> / Dissertation

Animal community structures, life histories and individual foraging behaviour are all an outcome of a trade-off between competition for resources (and thus the risk of starvation) and survival (and thus the risk of predation). The relative importance of these factors however, differs between ecosystems, and especially when comparing temperate to tropical ones, we usually find marked differences. The seasonality of tropical ecosystems is much reduced compared to temperate ones, and weather conditions are less extreme. Accordingly tropical systems are characterised by higher species diversity, and different life history traits have been found between temperate and tropical birds. However, how the different environmental factors interact, and how predation and starvation risk vary to cause these differences still remains largely unknown. We studied the feeding behaviour of several granivorous Estrildid finches in scrub savannah habitat in central Nigeria to test how they respond to varying degrees of starvation and predation risk. During field observations and aviary experiments we investigated whether there is seasonal variation in the birds’ foraging behaviour correlating with the abundance of grass seeds and tested how they respond to different group sizes and differing distances from cover (representing a difference in predation risk). Further we also carried out field observation on the natural feeding behaviour of several closely related sympartic Estrildid finches to investigate inter-specific and seasonal differences in competition and microhabitat choice to see if this could explain their coexistence. Finally we studied habitat choice, movement behaviour and breeding biology of the potentially threatened endemic Rock Firefinch (Lagonosticta sanguinodorsalis) between the wet and the dry season via radio-tracking to establish its habitat requirements and gain the first information in its life history traits and population trends. We found little seasonal variation in the species’ foraging behaviour, and parameters that varied did not do so in a consistent manner. Thus, we found little evidence for a seasonal change in the risk of starvation. However, the abundance of several bird species varied widely between seasons and species leaving during periods of food shortage might have released competition for remaining resources. Birds did not show a strong response in their feeding behaviour with respect to cover in either intake rate or timing of feeding. However, intake rate increased with group size, which we believe to be due to scramble competition rather than risk dilution. We therefore conclude that predation did not shape the foraging behaviour of tropical granivorous passerines as markedly as that of temperate ones. Rock Firefinches were found to breed between the late rainy and the early dry season. They selected inselberg habitat, where most nests were found between rocky boulders. During the dry season, when water sources in inselberg habitat had dried out, they had to fly distances of up to 700 m to the gallery forest to get water and this led to the inclusion of more scrub savannah and gallery forest within their home ranges. Daily egg survival was 0.89 ± 0.03 calculated after the Mayfield analysis and most failing nests were depredated probably mainly by lizards. We suggest that in addition to nest predation, water availability might limit breeding time and thus reproductive output of Rock Firefinches. Predation risk did not seem to be of high importance in shaping the birds’ feeding behaviour because there was no seasonal variation in the risk of starvation. We found some suggestive evidence that competition might be important and it is likely that bird populations constantly stay close to carrying capacity. In contrast to temperate regions the need to conserve water might be of higher importance in shaping the birds’ feeding behaviour. High adult survival rates might be due to reduced seasonality in the risk of starvation thereby leading to reduced predation risk on adult birds. High nest predation might also be of higher importance in shaping the life history traits of tropical passerines, but at present this suggestion remains speculative. The results fit into the general framework that there is a trade-off between starvation and predation risk, and in the absence of starvation risk for some species in tropical areas, predation risk is also relatively unimportant.

This study attempted to explain an apparent inverse relationship between pack ice proximity and breeding success of Black Guillemots (Cepphus grylle) on Cooper Island, a barrier island in the western Beaufort Sea near Barrow, AK. I elucidated the first linear relationship between energy density and body size for the elusive Arctic Cod (Boreogadus saida). I discovered and ground-truthed the existence of previously unknown guillemot foraging habitat on small 50 m2 ice floes distant from the pack ice. I developed new daily metrics for quantifying the provisioning to linear (8 d – 18 d) and Post-Linear (19 d – fledge) chicks. I found daily consensus between Linear and Post-Linear chicks about the level of provisioning at the colony. Finally, I explained those daily changes with significant correlations with wind speed and direction. / October 2007

This study attempted to explain an apparent inverse relationship between pack ice proximity and breeding success of Black Guillemots (Cepphus grylle) on Cooper Island, a barrier island in the western Beaufort Sea near Barrow, AK. I elucidated the first linear relationship between energy density and body size for the elusive Arctic Cod (Boreogadus saida). I discovered and ground-truthed the existence of previously unknown guillemot foraging habitat on small 50 m2 ice floes distant from the pack ice. I developed new daily metrics for quantifying the provisioning to linear (8 d – 18 d) and Post-Linear (19 d – fledge) chicks. I found daily consensus between Linear and Post-Linear chicks about the level of provisioning at the colony. Finally, I explained those daily changes with significant correlations with wind speed and direction.

This study attempted to explain an apparent inverse relationship between pack ice proximity and breeding success of Black Guillemots (Cepphus grylle) on Cooper Island, a barrier island in the western Beaufort Sea near Barrow, AK. I elucidated the first linear relationship between energy density and body size for the elusive Arctic Cod (Boreogadus saida). I discovered and ground-truthed the existence of previously unknown guillemot foraging habitat on small 50 m2 ice floes distant from the pack ice. I developed new daily metrics for quantifying the provisioning to linear (8 d – 18 d) and Post-Linear (19 d – fledge) chicks. I found daily consensus between Linear and Post-Linear chicks about the level of provisioning at the colony. Finally, I explained those daily changes with significant correlations with wind speed and direction.