Drivers of low breeding success in the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker Dendrocopos minor in England: testing hypotheses for the decline

Figures & data

Figure 1. Relationship between daily nest survival rates of Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers at the chick stage and provisioning rates per hour during the chick stage.

— •, combined adults; ––– ○, males only.

Figure 2. Mean (± se) male and female provisioning rates of Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers at the early- and late-chick stages. Comparisons are of nests with two parents present in the early-chick stage and late-chick stage and late-stage nests with male only.

White bars represent data from the present study; dotted bars represent data from studies in Sweden showing that the male can compensate for the female being absent (reproduced from Wiktander et al. [2000] with permission of the author and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.); in the ‘Late, male-only nests’ columns, the observed data are presented alongside those expected from the males if they are fully compensating for the loss of a female (the sum of the late male and female values from each study).

Figure 3. The relationship between rainfall and chick-stage daily nest failure rates in Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers.

The solid line shows the modelled relationship, with open circles showing the actual data.

Table 1. Comparison of key breeding parameters of Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers between the present study and those previously conducted on continental Europe.

Parameter	England	Sweden (Wiktander et al. 2001)	Germany (Rossmanith et al. 2007a)	UK (Glue & Boswell 1994)	England (RSPB pilot study 2005–2006)
Sample size	27	124	31	129	6
Project duration	3 years	10 years	6 years	40 years	2 years
Clutch size	5.20 ± 1.19	5.90 ± 0.26	5.40	5.20	Not available
Productivity	1.40 ± 1.73	3.50 (Wiktander et al. 1994)	Not available	3.50	Not available
Brood size	2.80 ± 1.42	4.60 ± 0.77	3.60	4.20	Not available
Breeding success	0.59 ± 0.55	0.80 ± 0.22	0.74	Not available	0.50 ± 0.55
Nest survival	0.52	Not available	Not available	0.83	0.67
Commonest cause of nest failure	Loss of one or more adults	Desertion by one or more adults	Nest predation by avian predators	Not available	Loss of one or more adults
% failures	55%	59%	63%		67%
Mean no. nests located per year	9	12	5	Not available	3
Data are presented as values ± sd, where available; Clutch size, maximum recorded clutch size; Productivity, number of fledglings produced per nesting attempt; Brood size, mean number of fledglings from successful nests; Breeding success, proportion of nests fledging one or more young (derived from raw figures); Nest survival, derived from Mayfield analyses.

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