Distress responses during handling in urban and exurban bandiny, the New Holland honeyeater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae), in southwestern Western Australia
M. Pearmain-Fenton
A B * , L. N. Gilson B , B. J. Saunders A and P. W. Bateman B
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A School of Molecular and Life Sciences, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia.
B Behavioural Ecology Laboratory, School of Molecular and Life Sciences, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia.
Pacific Conservation Biology 29(5) 419-428 https://doi.org/10.1071/PC22014
Submitted: 22 March 2022 Accepted: 12 September 2022 Published: 7 October 2022
© 2023 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Abstract
Context: Birds appear to be better suited than mammals or reptiles to adapt to fast-changing landscapes because of their greater mobility; however, the behavioural effects of urbanisation on birds in Australia remain broadly unexplored.
Aims: This study aimed to investigate the effects of urbanisation on behavioural responses exhibited by a common and widespread meliphagid, the bandiny or New Holland honeyeater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae) while undergoing standard bird banding processes.
Methods: Five non-invasive techniques (alarm calling, wriggling, biting, breathing rate, and tonic immobility) were explored for efficacy in identifying underlying differences in distress arising from mist-netting at urban and exurban localities in southwestern Western Australia.
Key results: Breathing rate was the most important variable for identifying differences in post-capture distress response. The breathing rate of urban bandiny following capture was lower than those of exurban areas. All other parameters proved suboptimal for detecting differential behavioural responses to handling between urban and exurban populations, despite having been successfully used in other international studies.
Conclusions: We suggest that urban honeyeaters exhibit lower mean breathing rates due to chronic overstimulation in response to urban lifestyles and are not able to further elevate this behaviour in response to stressful stimuli. The failure of other approaches explored highlights the need to apply ecosystem-appropriate methods for investigating urbanisation within an Australian context.
Implications: Our results suggest that behavioural approaches to quantifying avian stress developed internationally require additional consideration when applied to the ecosystems of Australia, whose birds are evolved to accommodate a different regime of seasonality that has shaped them behaviourally and morphologically.
Keywords: adaptive, behaviour, bird banding, distress, handling stress, Meliphagidae, passerine, urbanisation.
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