Temporal trade-offs between nestling provisioning and defence against nest predators in blue tits

Abstract

Offspring provisioning and nest defence are important forms of parental care. In birds, parents that engage in nest defence behaviour have to interrupt nestling provisioning with potentially harmful consequences for offspring growth and condition. To maximize fitness, parents should trade off optimal levels of offspring provisioning versus nest defence, but relatively little is known about how parents allocate their time between these two activities and how parental decisions to postpone provisioning vary as a function of the intensity of nest predation risk. We found that pairs of blue tits, Cyanistes caeruleus, adjusted parental care behaviours according to perceived immediate risk levels by switching from offspring provisioning to nest defence. In the presence of a direct nest predation threat, parents interrupted offspring provisioning for longer than in response to a novel object close to the nest, but still gradually resumed provisioning activity, probably because of a decrease in perceived predation risk over time. By increasing their provisioning effort once the immediate threat had diminished, parents compensated at least partly for the lost provisioning opportunities during high-risk situations. Hence, by adaptively adjusting the temporal trade-off between different parental care behaviours according to the perceived risk, blue tits are presumably able to mitigate potential negative long-term consequences of interruptions in provisioning during high-risk situations for offspring growth and condition.