This work is the fruit of a collaboration involving Xavier Lambin, Madan Oli, Mike Begon, and the heroic, superhuman, field sampling efforts of Sandra Telfer, James MacKinnon, Isla Graham, and Sarah Burthe (Universities of Aberdeen, Florida and Liverpool).

Oddly, debates on the demographic phenomenon that underpin multi-annual cycles have largely taken place in the absence of demographic data. The prediction that variation in predation rate should cause variation in survival rate over population cycles had remained untested. We refuted it strongly.

We analysed 10 years of capture recapture data collected monthly, spanning all seasons and phases of 3 population cycles. We estimated survival and recruitments rate and their contributions to changes in population growth rate between cycles phases in early, mid, late breeding seasons and winter.

Hello Could you please add me to the science feed as contributor. My googdcholar page is scholar.google.co.uk/citations?us...

This is work led by Amber Cowans (@ambercowans.bsky.social) and co-authored by Xavier Lambin (@lambin-ecology.bsky.social), and Darragh Hare.

All great people and worth a follow ☺️

TAKE HOME: We argue, using several strands of evidence, that diversionary feeding is a credible alternative to lethal control of predators and shows promising signs of reversing the decline of the capercaillie in Scotland.
Read the full paper here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 7/7

RESULT: Diversionary feeding increased the number of hens detected with chicks, consistent with our previous work showing a decrease in nest failure. This resulted in productivity (the expected chicks per hen) increasing from 0.82 in unfed sites to 1.9 in fed sites (more than double!). 6/7

HYPOTHESIS: Using a 3-year landscape-scale control-treatment experiment, we predicted that the chicks per hen differed between sites that deployed diversionary feeding and sites that did. 5/7

METHOD: We used #cameratraps on dust baths, natural features used by capercaillie, to detect capercaillie hens and determine whether they had chicks or didn’t have chicks. We used #AI from conservation ai to detect and count hens and broods. 4/7

BACKGROUND: Previously, we found that DF reduced artificial nest depredation, resulting in an 83% increase in nest survival. The big question though was whether this would translate to real birds. 3/7

All research wouldn't be possible without my fantastic co-authors: @lambin-ecology.bsky.social, @chrissuthy.bsky.social and @kennyafc.bsky.social l!! 🙏

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