Tracking movement in overwintering songbirds: An RFID approach

Globally, habitat loss and changes in land use are causing an increase in habitat fragmentation, which can negatively impact some songbird species. Urbanization in particular can create highly fragmented habitats with landscape corridors that vary greatly in their propensity to be crossed. In the study of animal movement, there are several factors that limit the quantity and quality of data that can be collected on individuals. In birds, movements occur quickly and often high in trees or in heavy brush, making detailed observations of the movements of known, colourbanded, individuals challenging. I utilized a Wi-Fi enabled radio-frequency identification (RFID) bird-feeder system in order to passively and autonomously track movement events of banded permanent resident songbirds (i.e., House Finches, Song Sparrows, Dark-eyed Juncos, and Mountain Chickadees) in the area of Kamloops, BC, Canada. I tracked banded and RFID tagged songbirds over a 63 day period from 1 January 2016 to 3 March 2016, recording 21732 visitation events by 28 individuals. From these visitation events I determine 817 movements by House Finches (n = 23 individuals), 176 movements by Mountain Chickadees (n = 2 individuals), and 15 movements by individuals of other songbird species. I then used ArcGIS to create resistance landscapes to ask whether movement patterns were best predicted by the “resistance” characteristic of the habitat between feeder locations or by straight-line distance. The movement patterns exhibited by tagged birds were not predicted by any of straight-line distance, least-cost distance, straight-line pathway resistance, or least-cost pathway resistance. However, feeders with a higher proportion of shrubs and trees were visited marginally more frequently. I also found that females traveled between feeders more frequently than males.