Supplementary feeding increases nestling feather corticosterone early in the breeding season in house sparrows.

ABSTRACT: Several studies on birds have proposed that a lack of invertebrate prey in urbanized areas could be the main cause for generally lower levels of breeding success compared to rural habitats. Previous work on house sparrows Passer domesticus found that supplemental feeding in urbanized areas increased breeding success but did not contribute to population growth. Here, we hypothesize that supplementary feeding allows house sparrows to achieve higher breeding success but at the cost of lower nestling quality. As abundant food supplies may permit both high- and low-quality nestlings to survive, we also predict that within-brood variation in proxies of nestling quality would be larger for supplemental food broods than for unfed broods. As proxies of nestling quality, we considered feather

SUBMITTER: Salleh Hudin N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5574790 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature