Séminaire lundi 27 mars 2017 : "Spoonbill migration in a changing world: from pattern to mechanism"

Résumé : Spoonbills Platalea leucorodia breed throughout Europe and winter in southern Europe and North and West Africa. There is immense variation in migration strategies, both within and between populations. This offers the exciting opportunity to study the causes and consequences of variation in migratory behaviour, at both the individual and population level.

During my PhD, I studied the demographic costs and benefits of long-distance migration by comparing the survival and reproductive success of spoonbills that breed in The Netherlands and winter along the Atlantic coast between France in the north and Senegal in the south. Using 25 years of data on colour-banded spoonbills, combined with intensive fieldwork in a Dutch breeding colony, I found that spoonbills that winter in Europe do better, both in terms of survival and reproductive output, than those that cross the Sahara to winter in West Africa. While an increasing part of the population is now wintering in Europe, the northward shift in the wintering distribution of spoonbills is slower than would be optimal to achieve maximal fitness. There thus seem to be factors that prevent spoonbills from making optimal winter site choices.

In the coming years, I will try to unravel the factors that are important in determining a spoonbill’s winter site choice, using a combination of resighting data and sophisticated tracking techniques, supplemented with field observations on food availability and social environment.

Photo : spatules blanches en Ariège, © Pierre Dalous –  Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23300565

Suivez l’actualité de la Tour du Valat et de l’Association des Amis de la Tour du Valat sur Facebook et Twitter :

Page Facebook de la Tour du Valat
Twitter Tour du Valat
Page Facebook de l’Association des Amis de la Tour du Valat