Abstract
Organisms have evolved annual cycles so that energy-intensive life-history events coincide with peak food abundance. I used breeding season mark-recapture data from American kestrels to test the hypothesis of whether the mismatch between lay-date and the start-of-spring would predict adult survival. We also tested whether the timing of when a bird fledged relative to the onset of spring predicted hatch-year mortality. Preliminary results show that timing did predict apparent survival rates of both adult and hatch-year kestrels. Understanding the fitness of breeding phenology for a species will help us predict how that species could be affected by a changing climate.
Original language | American English |
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State | Published - 12 Apr 2019 |