Abstract
During a study of a colour-marked population of Lesser Spotted Woodpecker (LSW) in NE Spain we found two cases of cooperative breeding, in which two females and a male were rearing the brood. One of the females was involved in both cooperative breeding cases, in two consecutive years. We analysed the feeding contribution of each individual to nestling care as well as feeding rates to nestlings. In both cases the male showed a (compensatory) reduction in nestling feeding due to the involvement of the second female. Total feeding rate increased slightly compared to regular (noncooperative) monogamous pairs. The high breeding success found in the second case (six eggs/six nestlings) is thought to be due to the cooperation of the three adults in nestling care. The two cooperative breeding cases were found in territories that suffered from significant selective logging of dead trees. This logging is thought to be a possible anthropogenic example of the ecological constraints hypothesis and a significant factor that could force atypical cooperative breeding attempts. A locally biased sex-ratio might result in the cooperation of two females and a male in both cases. No evidence of kinship was found among members of the cooperative breeding teams. We could not determine whether the cooperative breeding cases were monogamous or polygamous.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the direct support of this research by the Catalan institution Fundació Territori i Paisatge (Caixa de Catalunya). We would like to thank Raül Aymí (Catalan Institute of Ornithology, ICO, Barcelona, Spain) for valuable advice during the preparation of the manuscript. Ulf Wiktander helped us from the very beginning of the study with valuable comments, data and advice. Martjan Lammertink (Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA), Gilberto Pasinelli (Zoologisches Institut der Universität Zürich, Abteilung Oekologie, Zurich, Switzerland) and Eva Rossmanith (Universität Postdam, Institut für Biochemie und Biologie, Postdam, Germany) also gave us their helpful opinions when we discovered the cooperative breeding cases. We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for advice about previous versions of the manuscript. The authors would like to thank the collaboration of Sabine Mücke, Marta Pascual, Ramón Sanz, Francesc Macià, Jordi Faus, and Josep Salvanyà for their help during the course of the research. All of the manipulations of birds performed during this study comply with the current laws of the country in which they were performed.
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Communicated by F. Bairlein.
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Romero, J.L., Pérez, J. Two cooperative breeding cases in Lesser Spotted Woodpecker Dendrocopos minor . J Ornithol 149, 67–74 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-007-0219-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-007-0219-0