| Accession Number | 5003439 |
| Title | Interactions of gulls and Piping Plovers at Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, Cape |
| Cod, Mass. |
| Project Description | This project is designed to address a resource management question posed by Region 5, FWS, |
| namely, whether breeding Herring and Great Black-backed Gulls are interfering with nest-site |
| selection by Piping Plovers on South Island, Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, Cape Cod, Mass. |
| Detailed data will be taken on all actual interactions between the target species, as well as |
| quantifying any disturbances in plover biology that might follow therefrom. Should any disturbing |
| interactions be detected, they will be included in a logistic regression model to be developed to |
| predict suitable and unsuitable plover habitat on Monomoy, in an effort to determine whether or not |
| unexplained model variance can be confidently attributed to any interactions between gulls and |
| plovers that might be demonstrable. Attention will be paid to territory/home-range prospecting by |
| males and pairs, to egg-laying, to brood-rearing and to post-fledging activities of plovers. It also is |
| a goal of the project to locate and track all breeding plovers on South Monomoy Island. To obviate |
| unique, single-season effects, the study will run for several years. |
| Keywords | disturbance, great black-backed gull, herring gull, interference, migratory bird, monomoy nwr, |
| national wildlife refuge, piping plover, species interactions, |
| Principal | J.D. Fraser, Virginia Polytechnic University: fraser@vt.edu; P.A. Buckley, USGS Patuxent |
| Investigators | Wildlife Research Center: pabuckley@usgs.gov; |
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