Capture height biases for birds in mist-nets vary by taxon, season, and foraging guild in northern California

D Julian Tattoni,Katie Labarbera

doi:10.5751/jfo-00021-930101

Abstract

Tattoni, D. J., and K. LaBarbera. 2022. Capture height biases for birds in mist-nets vary by taxon, season, and foraging guild in northern California. Journal of Field Ornithology 93(1):1. https://doi.org/10.5751/JFO-00021-930101

Highlights

Mist-nets are widely used to survey bird presence, abundance, and survival (Dunn and Ralph 2004), for example at bird banding stations (Spotswood et al 2012) and in the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) and el Monitoreo de Sobrevivencia Invernal (MoSI) Programs (DeSante et al 1999, DeSante and Kaschube 2009)
Capture height biases were detected in 20 of these taxa (Fig. 1), with seven more likely to be captured in ground-level nets and 13 more likely to be captured in elevated nets
Demographic differences Of five taxa with sufficient known age captures in the summer and fall, only Swainson’s Thrush showed an age-related capture height bias: after-hatch year (AHY) birds were more likely to be captured in ground-level nets than hatch year (HY) birds

Summary

Introduction

Mist-nets are widely used to survey bird presence, abundance, and survival (Dunn and Ralph 2004), for example at bird banding stations (Spotswood et al 2012) and in the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) and el Monitoreo de Sobrevivencia Invernal (MoSI) Programs (DeSante et al 1999, DeSante and Kaschube 2009). There is, an additional potential bias in mist-netting that has far been studied little, rendering it difficult for researchers to account for: capture height bias

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