Dynamics of bird communities, populations, and individuals

This thesis contains three empirical research pieces and one literature review. The empirical work explores questions in behavioral, population, and community ecology. One empirical study draws on experimental data specifically collected for this thesis. The other two use different long-term capture-recapture datasets collected by other researchers. The first study, asks whether an experimentally manipulated environment affects mixed-species flock formation among birds wintering in Black Rock Forest, New York. It discusses the mechanism of mixed-flock formation and explores its possible adaptive benefits. The second study looks for evidence of short-term and long-term memory in the capture histories of Common Terns (Sterna hirundo) breeding in Great Gull Island, at the Eastern end of Long Island Sound. Inter-annual dependence among Common Tern captures operates predominantly on short-term memory. The final empirical study examines the pace of understory bird species loss in artificially isolated forest fragments in the central Amazon, Brazil. It reports that fragments with up to 100 ha in area lose one half of their initial number of species in less than twenty years. This diversity of empirical studies touches on a wide variety of ecological questions while drawing information from one taxonomic group---birds. Finally, a review examines the use of a popular term---habitat 'fragmentation'---in the ecological literature. There are more than sixteen different measures of fragmentation, the majority of which do not distinguish basic components of landscape change, such as habitat area and configuration. I explore the implications of such terminological vagueness upon the study and management of landscape change.