Abstract
Variation of wing pointedness index between groups of juveniles captured in different months (July, August, and September) and at different stages of juvenile moult was studied in three Acrocephalus warbler species captured on the Courish Spit on the Baltic Sea. Sedge warblers (Acrocephalus schoenobaenus) captured in July had less pointed wings than sedge warblers captured in August or September. Marsh warblers (A. palustris) showed no significant difference between birds in early and in late moult. No differences in wing pointedness were found between different cohorts of reed warblers (A. scirpaceus), including known locally hatched birds and late migrants captured in September. It is hypothesised that reed warbler populations in the northeastern Baltic are too evolutionarily young to have evolved a different wing shape as compared with the local Courish population.
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Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to all participants of the trapping project in Rybachy who collected the data analysed in this paper. I am grateful to the coordinator of the European-African Songbird Migration Network, Prof. Franz Bairlein, who insisted that ‘level 2’ data should be collected even if it was sometimes boring to do this. Petra Wurst translated the extended abstract into German. The comments of the anonymous reviewer helped me greatly to improve the manuscript.
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Chernetsov, N. Intraspecific variation of wing pointedness index in juvenile Acrocephalus warblers in the southeastern Baltic. J Ornithol 145, 105–108 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-003-0019-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-003-0019-0