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Trends in trappability and stop-over duration can confound interpretations of population trajectories from long-term migration ringing studies

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Abstract

We examined ringing data for three common passerines at a migration monitoring site with the objective of determining how closely the numbers of birds captured reflected the actual numbers of birds passing through this site. Mark–recapture analyses were used, fitting smooth inter-annual changes in re-trapping probability and apparent survival (continued presence within the study area). For all three species we found systematic declines in re-trapping probability over the roughly three decades of our study; one species showed systematic increases in daily apparent survival over this same time period. Within individual years, daily variation in wind and rainfall were found to affect re-trapping probability and apparent survival. The result of all of these effects was that long-term trends in the numbers of unique individual birds captured systematically over-estimated the declines for all three species, providing clear indication that the biological interpretation of these raw capture totals from ringing stations will not necessarily reflect actual changes in the abundance of species passing through these sites.

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Acknowledgments

We thank all of the people who participated in the collection of data at the Mettnau ringing station over the last decades. Specific mention must be made of Peter Berthold, Rolf Schlenker and Ulrich Querner who started the Mettnau ringing station and kept it running for over three decades. Insights and assistance with the software programme MARK from Gary White were essential to the completion of the analyses presented in this paper. Comments from Morten Frederiksen, Marc Kéry, Volker Salewski, Gavin Siriwardena, Michael Schaub and three anonymous reviewers greatly improved both our data analyses and the manuscript. Funding for the collection of data at the Mettnau ringing station and support for WF were provided by the Max Planck Society; earlier periods of work of the station were supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the German Ministry for Environmental Affairs. WMH thanks the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology for allowing leave, which permitted the time to start work on the analyses presented in this manuscript. All work related to the handling of birds was done in compliance with German law (current permit No. 56-8853.17/01 Regierungspräsidium Freiburg).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Ornithology, Cornell University, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850, USA

    Wesley M. Hochachka

  2. Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Vogelwarte Radolfzell, Schlossallee 2, 78315, Radolfzell, Germany

    Wolfgang Fiedler

Authors
  1. Wesley M. Hochachka
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  2. Wolfgang Fiedler
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Correspondence to Wesley M. Hochachka.

Additional information

Communicated by F. Bairlein.

Appendix A

Appendix A

Table 4

Table 4 Parameters estimated in the POPAN models that produced estimates of population size for graphing in Fig. 3
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Hochachka, W.M., Fiedler, W. Trends in trappability and stop-over duration can confound interpretations of population trajectories from long-term migration ringing studies. J Ornithol 149, 375–391 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-008-0282-1

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