Study On The Behavior Of Incubation And Chick Provisioning In Reed Parrotbill (Paradoxornis Heudei) And The Application Of Different Monitoring Methods

Incubation and chick provisioning are two of the most important parental investment of the bird's breeding season.The behavioral adaptation and regularity of its behaviors are important parts of reproductive strategy in life history.Reed Parrotbill(Paradoxornis heudei)is a rare and specific species of China.Their reproduction mainly base in the habitat of reeds,both the female and male are involved in reproduction.But there are little studies about Reed Parrotbill's in terms of the incubation and chick provisioning pattern in different regions.Furthermore,more and more monitoring equipment is used in the reproductive ecology of the bird.However,selecting more reasonable monitoring equipments for different birds is also an important problem.In this study,video-recording is used to analyse the incubation and chick provisioning pattern about the Reed Parrotbill,by studying on the application of Infra-red camera and temperature date logger that in the monitoring of incubation and chick provisioning to find a more suitable method for monitoring productive behavior of birds with small size finch,nesting hidden,and open nest.The results of the study are as follows:All the male and female of Reed Parrotbill take part in the incubation process.For every hour the frequency of incubation is 1.54±0.64 times,the single incubation time lasts for 27.61±10.99 min,and the proportion of incubation is 62.3±27.54 %.There is a significant difference between the frequency of incubation(P<0.01)and incubation duration(P<0.01).Which shows that Liaohe delta wetland is higher than that of Yellow river delta wetland.This might be related to the differences of population or the temperature caused by different latitudes in different regions.Reed Parrotbill's incubation duration shows an increasing trend as the nest age increases.There is no obvious daily activity pattern changes as the incubation frequency is 1-3time per hour.The male and female chick feeding together,and it shows little differences in terms of the frequency of chick feeding.As a whole,Reed Parrotbill's chick feedingfrequency is 7.64±2.52 times per hour,the average chick feeding time is 4.58±3.55 min,and the proportion of chick feeding is 50.22±27.36 %.Also,there exists obvious differences among Reed Parrotbill's chick feeding time,average internal time of chick feeding and proportion of chick feeding.However,there is no difference as for the average frequency of chick feeding.As for the average chick feeding time,Liaohe delta wetland is lower than Yellow river delta wetland(P<0.05);the average internal time of chick feeding is Liaohe delta wetland significant higher than Yellow river delta wetland(P<0.05)and Caofeidian wetland(P<0.05);the proportion of chick feeding is that Liaohe delta wetland lower than Yellow river delta wetland(P<0.05)and Caofeidian wetland(P<0.05).The frequency of chick feeding rises as the nestling age rises and there is not an obvious change for Reed Parrotbill's frequency of chick feeding in different periods(F=2.55,P>0.05).The three different equipments indicate that,the records from Infra-red camera are lower than that of video-recording obviously,the incubation(or chick feeding)duration,internal time of duration are higher than that of video-recording.This means the working theory of Infra-red camera cause a loss of data which is not suitable for the monitoring of bird's reprodutive behaviors;furthermore,the incubation pattern recorded by the temperature date logger is basically the same as the video data.It means this is far more suitable for studying the bird's incubation behaviors.However,as the temperature within the nest can not be recorded this method is not very suitable for applying the study of birds' chick provisioning behaviours.