Kleptoparasitism by attacks versus false alarm calls in fork-tailed drongos
Highlights
► We investigate the benefit of using false alarm calls to steal food. ► Study on fork-tailed drongos which steal food using attacks and false alarms. ► Made false alarms when attacks costly, increasing opportunities to steal food. ► Increased overall success as attacks could still be made when false alarms failed. ► Principle benefit of false alarms is that they reduce costs of conflict over food.
Section snippets
Study Site and Population
We studied a population of fork-tailed drongos in the South African Kalahari Desert (26°58′S, 21°49′E) from March to July 2008 and April to September 2009. Details of the habitat and climate have been published elsewhere (Clutton-Brock et al. 1999). The study population consisted of 64 drongos, habituated to observation at less than 5 m. Each individual was captured using walk-in traps baited with mealworms, triggered by an observer using a pull string to avoid injury from accidental trap
Use of False Alarms versus Attacks
Fork-tailed drongos made false alarm calls in 55 ± 4% of kleptoparasitism attempts (N = 822 kleptoparasitism attempts by 64 drongos; Fig. 2). They made false alarm calls more frequently in kleptoparasitism attempts for small food items than in attempts for large items (Appendix Table A1, Fig. 3a). Adult drongos were also more likely to make false alarm calls when targeting larger species than smaller species, although juvenile drongos did not differ (Appendix Table A1; Fig. 3b). Further analysis
Discussion
Fork-tailed drongos are likely to benefit from making false alarm calls when attempting to kleptoparasitize food because they avoid the costs of kleptoparasitic attacks. Drongos made false alarm calls more often in kleptoparasitism attempts for smaller food items despite false alarms being no more effective than attacks and food items of different sizes being no more or less frequently defended. They also made false alarms more often when targeting larger species, which defended their food more
Acknowledgments
Access to the study site and meerkats was kindly provided by the Kalahari Research Trust, T. Clutton-Brock and M. Manser. This work would not have been possible without the support of A. Ridley who initially established the drongo study population and provided access to the pied babblers. We thank two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on the manuscript. Many thanks to N. Davies for supervision and M. Nelson-Flower, R. Sutcliffe, J. Sampson, M. Bell and the Bird Behavioural
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