North American Crane Working Group
Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop
Date of this Version
2023
Document Type
Article
Citation
Proceedings of the North American Crane Workshop (2023) 16: 69–80
Abstract
Evaluating site use and fidelity is vital to understanding roosting area needs for individual birds. We used data from wintering Aransas-Wood Buffalo population whooping cranes tracked with Platform Transmitting Terminals to identify roost sites in Texas. We analyzed 86 unique winters across 42 individuals and used a hierarchical clustering approach to group roost locations that were within 100 m of each other to identify unique roost sites by individual (n = 2,608). We found that on average, whooping cranes used 30.3 ± 1.71 SE roost sites per winter (range 8–70; 30 September and 2 May) and spent on average 4.4 ± 0.18 nights (median = 1, range 1-109) total at each site through the winter. In addition, roost sites consisted of 2.8 ± 0.07 (median = 1, range 1–33) distinct roost periods on average throughout the winter, indicating revisitation of sites throughout the season. Area of roost sites overlapped with 22.4 ± 0.02% (range 0.0-64.5) of the area visited in a previous year. Subadult whooping cranes were found to use more roost sites in a winter (40.5 ± 2.73) than adults without juveniles (23.0 ± 3.80) and family groups (27.55 ± 2.60). Subadults also spent fewer nights total at roost sites (3.53 ± 0.22) and revisited roost sites less often (2.39 ± 0.10). For nights with at least 2 locational data points (n = 5,227), whooping cranes used more than 1 roost site 6% of the nights (n = 293). Reliance on multiple sites throughout the winter suggests that a network of roost sites for whooping cranes is important. Future research should identify characteristics of primary roost sites and investigate the drivers behind their use within and across winters.
Comments
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