Interspecific competition between two partridges in farmland landscapes
Section snippets
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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