Parental provisioning in response to natural variation of brood size in the black-billed magpie (pica pica): Video analysis of behaviors in the nests

Abstract

Natural selection will favor parents who adjust their effort in relation to the fitness costs and benefits from the current brood. In this study, we investigated how magpie parents adjust provisioning effort based on the number of nestlings in the brood, by analyzing video recordings of begging and feeding behaviors of birds. The number of visits per hour increased with brood size, but the number of feeding events per visit did not. Because of the latter, parental provisioning that a nestling is receiving on average decreased in larger broods. This may be viewed either as an evidence for the limitation of parental provisioning in larger broods, or as an evidence of parental strategy optimizing the brood-size-specific provisioning effort for the current reproductive event as a tradeoff between current and future reproduction. With other aspects of parental provisioning behavior, we did not find clear indication that parent confronts upper limitation in provisioning large broods. Pervisit number of feeding and nestlings' body condition around the time of fledging did not depend on brood size, which implies that parental effort is not at its limit in larger broods. Based on the results, we suggest that the provisioning effort of black-billed magpie parents is better explained by the life-history trade-off model for provisioning.