Common Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) increasingly select for grazed areas with increasing distance-to-nest.

ABSTRACT: The abundant and widespread Common Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) is currently declining across much of Europe due to landscape changes caused by agricultural intensification. The proximate mechanisms causing adverse effects to breeding Starlings are unclear, hampering our ability to implement cost-efficient agri-environmental schemes to restore populations to former levels. This study aimed to show how this central foraging farmland bird uses and selects land cover types in general and how use of foraging habitat changes in relation to distance from the nest. We attached GPS-loggers to 17 breeding Starlings at a Danish dairy cattle farm in 2015 and 2016 and analysed their use of different land cover types as a function of distance intervals from the nest and their relative availability. As e

SUBMITTER: Heldbjerg H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5542446 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature