Abstract
IN many bird colonies there is a surplus of adult birds in or about the colony which fail to breed1,2. In several species, the failure to breed can be attributed to the inability to obtain a suitable nest-site within the colony limits, and this results in competition for the limited number of available sites. Experiments on the kittiwake Rissa tridactyla have shown that some of these non-breeding adults will breed if suitable unoccupied ledges are made available in the centre of the colony, but similar sites remain unused on the periphery (Coulson, in preparation). This and other observations indicate that the competition among males, which are responsible for nest-site selection, is more intense in the colony centre and investigations were made to determine whether the birds nesting centrally in the colony differed in quality from those breeding near the edge.
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