Abstract
Accurate sexing of birds is vital for behavioral studies but can be a real problem in the field, especially for monomorphic species. Our goal here was to characterize the morphology of male and female monomorphic pale-winged starlings (Onychognathus nabouroup), a South African sturnid whose plumage is sexually monomorphic. Morphological measurements of genetically sexed animals indicated that males were statistically larger than females for five measurements: Mass, tail length, tarsus length and wing length. By using a Discriminant Function Analysis based on the measurements taken by one ringer, we were able to predict correctly the sex of 81.10% of the birds of data collected in the field and 77.9% of museum skins independently of year of capture and ringer. The model developed here should be useful for further field studies of this species.
Highlights
Accurate sexing of birds is a major issue for most ornithological studies but can be a real problem in the field, especially when the species is monomorphic
One possible approach is to separate males and females by behavioural differences, but this may be impractical in terms of the time available [6] and for species for which precise sex identification is necessary to establish behavioural differences
Discriminant function analysis has been used for an array of species [2] and enables the development of an equation weighting the different parameters according to their relative importance in sex differentiation
Summary
Accurate sexing of birds is a major issue for most ornithological studies but can be a real problem in the field, especially when the species is monomorphic. The only reliable method is to sex birds using genetic information from blood, feather or buccal swab samples after capture, but current techniques are expensive, time consuming [1, 2, 3, 4] and the first two techniques are too invasive to be used for endangered species [5]. This means that critical gender information is not available immediately in the field. Discriminant function analysis has been used for an array of species [2] and enables the development of an equation weighting the different parameters according to their relative importance in sex differentiation
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