Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 165, July 2020, Pages 23-34
Animal Behaviour

Interspecific competition between two partridges in farmland landscapes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.04.018Get rights and content

Interspecific competition is expected to occur between phylogenetically closely related species when sharing resources. In birds, interspecific competition often occurs by song-mediated interference and frequently implies asymmetrical outcomes between the species pairs involved. Habitat loss resulting from agricultural intensification is expected to have aggregated bird species in the remaining suitable habitats, thus increasing the likelihood of interspecific competition. However, this process has rarely been considered as a potential factor limiting population recovery in farmland birds. We investigated whether interspecific competition occurs between grey, Perdix perdix, and red-legged, Alectoris rufa, partridges, two phylogenetically related species. Originally parapatric, they have suffered an artificial increase in their contact zone due to huge human-mediated gamebird releases. We analysed territorial behaviour through a playback stimuli experiment and investigated shifts in habitat niche in the absence and presence of a hypothetical competitor. Results showed that the grey partridge appeared less territorial when co-occurring with the red-legged partridge and shifted its habitat niche away from the latter, while no such change was detected for the red-legged partridge. These asymmetrical patterns in behaviour and ecology are predicted under an interspecific competition scenario beneficial to the red-legged partridge, and therefore suggest that they are competitively dominant to grey partridges where they co-occur. This result has potentially strong implications for the management of grey partridges as gamebirds, and for their conservation in areas where they are almost extirpated.

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Study Area

The study was conducted in the Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research platform (LTSER) ‘Zone Atelier Plaine & Val de Sèvre’ (hereafter, ZAPVS), central western France, (Fig. 1 ; Bretagnolle et al., 2018b), in 2016 and 2017. This is a 435 km2 zone of intensive agricultural cultivation, comprising winter cereals (41.5%), sunflower (10.4%), maize (9.6%), rape (8.3%), meadows (13.5%), woodlands (2.9%) and built-up areas (9.8% ; average values 2009–2016 in Bretagnolle et al., 2018b). Within the ZAPVS, a

Territorial Behaviour

Among the surveyed points (combining both study sites), there were 21 and 106 points (2016 and 2017, respectively) with at least one species in one of the four sampling sessions. Assuming that the presence of an individual in at least one sampling session for a given point count reflected the presence of a territorial pair, 37 points (7.5%) with grey partridge, 74 (15.1%) with red-legged partridge and 16 (3.3%) with both species were recorded. We found that grey partridge territorial responses

Discussion

As expected, our results suggest an asymmetric pattern of territorial behaviour between grey and red-legged partridges. Grey partridges reduced their territorial response and shifted both their hourly territorial behaviour and their habitat niche when co-occurring with the red-legged partridge.

Such shifts in territorial behaviour intensity towards a more discreet behaviour when facing a competitive species have been documented previously in birds (e.g. Martin and Martin, 2001a, McEntee, 2014)

Acknowledgments

We thank all the fieldworkers who contributed to the data collection. We also thank Nicholas Aebischer, Elisabeth Bro, Jérome Moreau, Romain Julliard, Daniel Fortin, Mathieu Boos and the anonymous referees for their valuable comments on the manuscript. Finally, we thank the Fédérations Départementales 79 (Guy Guédon and Claude Jarriau) and 49 (Edouard-Alain Bidault, Michel Durchon and Alexandre Roy) for their support. This work was supported by the Fédération Nationale des Chasseurs (grant

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