Behavioral Implications
Gleaning, like other methods of foraging, is a highly visual activity, and as such has some implications for birds. First, to see requires light, and thus time allotted to gleaning is limited to daytime. Second, while a bird focuses on examining an area for prey items, it must necessarily divert its attention from scanning its surroundings for predators. Birds that glean in tree branches will often join together in a flock, and often with other gleaners in a mixed-species foraging flock. It has been shown that individual birds feeding in flocks are able to spend more time looking for food and less time looking for predators.
On the other hand, it is not a universal trait of gleaning birds to join with other species or even to be gregarious with their own kind. The leafbirds of Asia are foliage-gleaners, but are often found singly or in pairs. Also, where multiple species of gleaning birds forage in the same area, they may show niche segregation; for example, one species may stick to conifers while another species inhabits broadleaf trees, or they may even divide up a habitat, with smaller species feeding among higher, smaller tree branches and larger species staying on lower, larger branches.
Read more about this topic: Gleaning (birds)
Famous quotes containing the word implications:
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)