Breeding productivity, nest-site selection and conservation needs of the endemic Turkestan Ground-jay Podoces panderi
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Breeding productivity, nest‑site selection and conservation needs of the endemic Turkestan Ground‑jay Podoces panderi Robert J. Burnside1 · Alex L. Brighten1 · Nigel J. Collar2 · Valentin Soldatov3 · Maxim Koshkin4 · Paul M. Dolman1 · Anna Ten5 Received: 23 January 2020 / Revised: 27 March 2020 / Accepted: 19 May 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The Turkestan Ground-jay Podoces panderi, a corvid endemic to the deserts of Central Asia, is both understudied and underprotected. Using standardised nest-monitoring protocols and nest cameras, we estimated its breeding productivity for the first time as 0.586 fledglings per nesting attempt (inter-quartile range, IQR 0.413‒0.734), strongly constrained by a diverse set of predator species (accounting for 88% of failures), supporting the broad pattern that a wide spectrum of nest predators operate in arid environments. The probability of nest success for the 35 days from the start of incubation to fledging was low, 0.186 ± 0.06 se (N = 37), with no influence of season date, nest height or nest shrub species. However, pervasive shrub harvest severely limited availability of taller shrubs for nest-site selection, and thus our ability to detect any effect of height on nest survival. Mean clutch size was 4.8 ± 0.8 sd while hatching probability of an egg from a clutch surviving incubation was 0.800 ± 0.050 se and fledging probability was 0.824 ± 0.093 se for individual chicks in successful nests (i.e. that fledged one or more chicks). Two shrub genera, saxaul Haloxylon spp. and Calligonum spp., were used for nesting more frequently 2 than expected ( 𝜒15 = 784.02, P
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