Planet of Birds

European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster) Science Article 3 abstract Arid environments are fragile ecosystems where management is particularly complicated.Determining target species that contribute to understanding the functioning of suchenvironments is of basic importance. Here we assess the role of the European bee-eater, aburrow-nesting bird species, as an ecosystem engineer in arid ecosystems. We concludethat this species […]

European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster) Science Article 2 abstract […]. Here we report repeatability and heritability values for wing length and weight in the European Bee-Eater, Merops apiaster. […]. C. M. Lessels and G. N. Ovenden, The Condor 91:21C-214 Download article download full text (pdf)

European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster) Science Article 1 abstract This example of bigamy is interesting, because it does not fit with current hypotheses about the adaptive value of polygyny. Orians (1969) argued that females may sometimes gain by being the second female on a good territory rather than a lone female on a poor territory, and […]

European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster) Science Article 5 abstract We studied breeding biology of the European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster) at a colony in southern France from 1983 to 1987. Approximately 50% of the breeding birds were juveniles (hatched the previous calendar year), and ca. 34% of the breeding birds in any year were known to return […]

European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster) Science Article 6 abstract Avian cooperative breeding has been regarded as an ideal system in which to investigate the role of kin selection in the evolution of altruistic behaviour (Brown 1987). However, many studies of helping at the nest have been carried out on communally breeding species in which the costs […]

European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster) Science Article 4 abstract The European bee-eater (Merops apiaster) is the rst known species of theorder Coraciiformes and the second bird species whose distribution dependson the granulometrical characteristics of soils constituting suitable banks forbreeding. The mean particle size of soil samples from bee-eater nest placeswas 42.76  13.58 m (max 66.82 […]