Short‐ and long‐term effects of tracking devices on the European Roller Coracias garrulus |
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| Authors: | J. Rodríguez‐Ruiz D. Parejo J. de la Puente F. Valera M. A. Calero‐Torralbo A. Bermejo I. Catry J. M. Avilés |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Departamento de Ecología Funcional y Evolutiva, EEZA, CSIC, Almería, Spain;2. área de Zoología, Departamento de Anatomía, Biología Celular y Zoología, Universidad de Extremadura, Badajoz, Spain;3. área de Estudio y Seguimiento de Aves, SEO/BirdLife, Madrid, Spain;4. Centro de Ecologia Aplicada ‘Prof. Baeta Neves’ and InBio – Rede de Investiga??o em Biodiversidade e Biologia Evolutiva, Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal |
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| Abstract: | Tracking devices have contributed enormously to our knowledge of avian migration, although their effects on birds are controversial. Here, we study the short‐ and long‐term effects of deploying geolocators on European Rollers Coracias garrulus and assess the optimal weight of tracking devices to use. In nests in which both parents had geolocators, brood mass was lighter than in nests where only one or neither parent had a geolocator. The year‐to‐year recapture rate for Rollers tagged with geolocators was lower than that for control birds and the recapture rate in different populations was negatively related to the device‐to‐bird weight ratio, decreasing greatly when the weight ratio exceeded 2.5%. |
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| Keywords: | brood mass geolocator migration recapture rate |
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