Abstract
Hydrogen stable isotope analysis of feathers is an important tool for estimating the natal or breeding latitudes of nearctic-neotropical migratory birds. This method is based on the latitudinal variation of hydrogen stable isotope ratios in precipitation in North America (δDp) and the inheritance of this variation in newly formed feathers (δDf). We hypothesized that the typically strong relationship between δDp and δDf would be decoupled in birds that forage in marine food webs because marine waters have relatively high δD values compared to δD values for local precipitation. Birds that forage on marine prey bases should also have feathers with high δ34S values, since δ34S values for marine sulfate are generally higher than δ34S values in terrestrial systems. To examine this potential marine effect on feather stable isotope ratios, we measured δD and δ34S in the feathers of nine different species of raptors from both inland and coastal locations across North America. Feathers from coastal bird-eating raptors had consistently higher δD and δ34S values than feathers from inland birds. Birds that had high δ34S values also deviated strongly from the typical relationship between δDp and δDf. We recommend measuring both sulfur and hydrogen stable isotope ratios in feathers when some members of a migrant population could potentially forage in marine habitats. We suggest using a practical cutoff of δ34S >10‰ to remove marine-foraging birds from a migrant sample when using stable isotopes of hydrogen to estimate the latitudinal origins of migrants because high δDf values for marine-foraging birds could potentially distort estimates of origins.
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Acknowledgements
This project would never have been possible without the contributions of many organizations and individuals. HawkWatch International would like to thank the Disney Wildlife Conservation Foundation for the Disney Conservation Award that funded this research. We thank the following curators, collections managers, and assistants for their invaluable contributions of feather samples for this study: David Willard and John Bates at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; Kevin McGowan at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates; John Gerwin and Becky Browning from the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Sciences; Andrew Kratter at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville; and Tamar Danufsky at the Wildlife Collection at Humboldt State University. We are very grateful to Zachary Sharp and Viorel Atudorei for timely technical assistance throughout our laboratory analysis in New Mexico. Zachary Sharp also provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. We also thank Mark Chappell and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments during the review process. Thanks to Ruth Smith, John DeLong, Jon Larrabee, Aaron Barna, and Steve De La Pena for lab assistance and discussion. We thank the outstanding staff of HawkWatch International for their administrative support and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for their support of the Florida Keys Raptor Migration Project. Thanks to the staff of Audubon's Tavernier Science Center for office support during the writing of this paper and National Science Foundation grant EAR-9727141 for support of the stable isotope lab at the University of New Mexico.
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Lott, C.A., Meehan, T.D. & Heath, J.A. Estimating the latitudinal origins of migratory birds using hydrogen and sulfur stable isotopes in feathers: influence of marine prey base. Oecologia 134, 505–510 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-002-1153-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-002-1153-8