Planet of Birds

Blackbird (Turdus merula) Science Article 5 abstract Fat reserves are stored energy that may help birds survive periods of harsh winter weather. This hypothesis predicts that annual apparent survival is higher for birds with large fat reserves than for birds with few or no fat reserves in winter. Blackbirds (Turdus merula Linnaeus) were ringed in […]

Blackbird (Turdus merula) Science Article 3 abstract An urban Blackbird Turdus merula population was studied in Budapest from 1986 to 1989. Seasonal pattern of breeding success was similar in three out of the four years: early nests were successful then the success rapidly fell, reaching another maximum in the third part of the breeding season, […]

Blackbird (Turdus merula) Science Article 4 abstract It is theoretically well established that body mass in birds is the consequence of a trade-off between starvation risk and predation risk. There are, however, no studies of mass variation from sufficiently large wild populations to model in detail the range of diurnal and seasonal mass change patterns […]

Blackbird (Turdus merula) Science Article 2 abstract Because of the extreme ecological and environmental changes along an urban-rural gradient, it has been proposed that urbanised and non-urbanised populations of the same species may be distinctly isolated. There is evidence that urban populations have become significantly different from the original forest populations in several aspects. However, […]

Blackbird (Turdus merula) Science Article 1 abstract The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of habitat fragmentation on Blackbird Turdus merula recruitment in 21 urban parks in the city of Madrid (Spain) during two consecutive breeding seasons (1997-98). We found that: (1) recruitment did not vary between years, showing high levels of […]