Agricultural habitat use and selection by a sedentary bird over its annual life cycle in a crop-depredation context.

backgroundModern agriculture has undoubtedly led to increasing wildlife-human conflicts, notably concerning bird damage in productive and attractive crops during some parts of the annual cycle. This issue requires utmost attention for sedentary birds that may impact agricultural crops at any stage of their annual life cycle. Reducing bird-human conflicts requires a better understanding of the relationship between bird foraging activity and the characteristics of agricultural areas, notably with respect to changes in food-resource availability and crop sensitivity across the year.

methodsWe explored how GPS-tagged adult male western jackdaws- sedentary corvids- utilize agricultural areas throughout their annual cycle, in a context of crop depredation. More precisely, we described their daily occurrence distribution and the extent of habitat use and selection consistency with respect to landscape composition across time.

resultsJackdaws moved in the close agricultural surroundings of their urban nesting place over the year (< 2.5 km from the nest, on average). Daily occurrence distributions were restricted (< 2.2 km

conclusionsOur findings demonstrate the very limited space use by breeding male jackdaws which foraged preferentially in grasslands. We call for future investigations in other agricultural contexts and also considering non-breeders for extrapolation purposes.