As I am working on tropical butterfly phenology, I am interested in the (breeding) phenology of tropical birds, especially insectivorous birds that eat caterpillars or butterflies. Can their phenology be monitored with nest boxes? How is their diet determined? Most importantly, what are good sources of information on tropical bird phenology? I would be grateful for any advice.
Hi Freerk,
There is quite a bit of work on the breeding phenology of tropical birds. A colleague and I are actually putting together such a paper right now using some data we have from Panama. Because of the very long breeding seasons and low nest survival of many tropical species (compared to temperature or arctic species), the labor required to obtain some phenological data is quite intense. So, you might guess that this makes really good phenological data for tropical birds quite scarce compared to birds from other areas. That said, there are many excellent tropical ornithologists who have exerted great effort to publish such data in species accounts and in the primary literature. (Some of the best phenological data I've found is in older articles of The Auk or The Condor.) A decent introduction to tropical birds can also be found in Stutchbury and Morton's "Behavioral Ecology of Tropical Birds." It simplifies quite a bit and is heavily biased by some of the authors own notions (as it should be!), but I think it serves as an excellent discussion starter and a quick read.
The best resource by far for tropical birds is the relatively new Cornell Neotropical Birds website (http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/home). This should provide quite a bit of good reading for you. Most authors have made sure to summarize almost every publication pertaining to a given species.
Concerning your question of nest boxes: Others may weigh in with better and more first-hand perspectives, but the use of nest boxes seems to have mixed results in some areas. In central Panama, where I work, I've heard that nest boxes used for House Wrens seemed associated with higher rates of bot fly infestation that natural nests. In other species like woodcreepers, individuals failed to recruit to these boxes altogether, probably as a consequence of adequate supply of natural nest cavities. So, this might be a challenge, but that's what tropical ornithology is all about.
Good luck! I'll be interested in any other tropical ornithologists are on RG and are willing to weigh in about other resources.
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