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1 January 2020 Differential Use of Nectar Feeders Among Migrant and Resident Hummingbirds
Laura E. Nuñez-Rosas, María Del Coro Arizmendi
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Abstract

The use of artificial nectar feeders has increased in the past decades. Feeders represent extra food resource at a low cost that can cause an increment of hummingbird populations in urban and rural areas. Assuming that migrant hummingbirds have had contact with feeders in breeding areas, we propose that when feeders are held for the first time in an area, migrant hummingbirds will be visiting the novel resource faster than the resident species. Second, assuming that the finding of new resources is correlated with habitat structure, hummingbirds will visit earlier the feeders in places with less environmental complexity as a rural area. This study was done at the southern coast of the Mexican state of Jalisco in a rural area and in a protected natural area. Three twin feeders were placed in each area and visitation was recorded in periods of 50 minutes during morning and afternoon. We found that (a) migrant hummingbird began visiting the feeders in less time than residents at all the feeders, (b) once migrants used the feeder’s residents began visiting, and (c) in the rural site visitation occurred earlier than in the natural forest. These findings support that hummingbirds learn to use novel food sources and remember used resources recognizing them at the landscape level, and that residents never exposed to an artificial food source learn to use them faster in more open areas and after migrants used them.

© The Author(s) 2019 Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Laura E. Nuñez-Rosas and María Del Coro Arizmendi "Differential Use of Nectar Feeders Among Migrant and Resident Hummingbirds," Tropical Conservation Science 12(1), (1 January 2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/1940082919878960
Received: 30 April 2019; Accepted: 7 September 2019; Published: 1 January 2020
KEYWORDS
feeders
hummingbird learning
Mexico
migrant hummingbird
resident hummingbird
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