Nest remains are insufficient to identify predators of waterfowl nests
Kaylan M. Kemink
A * , Kyle J. Kuechle A , Mason L. Sieges A , Sam Krohn A B , Cailey D. Isaacson A B , John Palarski A B , Nick Conrad A B , Allicyn Nelson A B , Boyan Liu A , Thomas K. Buhl C and Susan N. Ellis-Felege B
A Great Plains Regional Office, Ducks Unlimited Inc., 2525 River Road, Bismarck, ND, USA.
B Department of Biology, University of North Dakota, 10 Cornell Street, Grand Forks, ND, USA.
C U.S. Geological Survey, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, Jamestown, ND, USA.
Wildlife Research 50(3) 182-189 https://doi.org/10.1071/WR22042
Submitted: 4 March 2022 Accepted: 23 July 2022 Published: 19 September 2022
© 2023 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)
Abstract
Context: Nest predation is a leading cause of nest failure for most ground-nesting birds. Methods that allow for accurate classification of fate and identification of predators are important for understanding productivity and conservation strategies. Past studies have used a visual inspection of nest remains to determine nest fate and predict predator identity. Most formal assessments of these methods have addressed small-bodied birds nesting in trees or shrubs, and have revealed that use of evidence at nests can be relatively accurate for determining nest fate but may lead to incorrect conclusions regarding predator identity. However, few have tested the latter hypothesis for larger ground-nesting birds with precocial young.
Aim: We aimed to evaluate a classification system developed for determining nest fate and identifying predators of waterfowl nests, at both the scale of individual nests and across the study area.
Methods: From 2016 to 2020, we located 989 blue-winged teal (Spatula discors), mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) and gadwall (Mareca strepera) nests in central North Dakota. We placed cameras at a subset of 249 nests and recorded evidence of nest remains at depredated nests.
Key results: The most common predators were American badgers (Taxidea taxus), followed by striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis), raccoons (Procyon lotor) and red foxes (Vulpes vulpes). Using evidence of nest remains, we determined nest fates with high accuracy (98.0%). However, evidence of nest remains was only sufficient for identifying predators at 50% of nests, and the classification system was correct only 69.7% of the time. The predicted proportion of predators across the study area differed between the classification system and our video evidence as well.
Conclusions: The accuracy of predator identifications based upon the classification system that we evaluated was not supported at any scale.
Implications: Our results suggest that evidence of nest remains can be used to determine nest fate for large-bodied precocial, ground-nesting birds, but accurate identification of nest predators will require alternative methods such as nest cameras.
Keywords: badger, conservation, grassland, nest camera, Prairie Pothole Region, predation, waterfowl, wetland.
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