A Bird Community of New Guinean Lowland Rainforest. 3 Vertical Distribution of the Avifauna

Bird Communities of the Lower Waria Valley, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea: A Comparison between Habitat Types

“…Some reasons for this study not finding any differences may be the small data set used for comparison (three sites for each habitat) and the fact that many forest insectivores are small, utilising the dense understorey [44] or have a skulking nature, making positive identification difficult without knowledge of their songs. Forest insectivores may therefore be underrepresented in this study in terms of relative abundance.…”

“…Most fruit is found in the canopy of tropical forests [22], and in a study at Brown River in Central Province PNG, the vast majority of obligate frugivores were recorded in the canopy [44]. Whilst proportions of obligate frugivores in agricultural habitats were far lower than in forested habitats, the proportion of the insectivore-frugivore guild was significantly higher.…”

“…The two main studies of lowland avifauna in New Guinea have also been conducted in the south-east peninsula at Lakekamu (approximately 140 km west of the lower Waria) [46] and the Brown River (approximately 20 km north of Port Moresby) [22,40,44,[47][48][49], though both of these are located on the southern side of the central cordillera. Both of these recorded 184 species, though only 149 (68%) of the total 219 species were shared [45].…”

Vertical attenuation of light predicts the sequence to dawn song in a tropical forest avifuana

“…-Foraging height has been found to be a speciesspecific trait in several lowland rainforest bird communities (Pearson 1971, Bell 1982, Marra and Remsen 1997, Walther 2002) and results reported here support these findings.…”

“…Flagging tape placed on tree limbs at 5, 10 and 15 m above the ground was used as a reference frame for practice. Vertical position of birds (within 1 m) was estimated between 0800 -1000 h. Foraging height has been argued to be an important species-specific trait in tropical forest birds (Pearson 1971, Bell 1982, Walther 2002 (Jahn et al 2002, Coopmans et al 2004 Willis (1972), Willis and Oniki (1978), Munn and Terborgh (1979), and Terborgh et al (1990). Because the remaining 57 species (49 genera) were considered a more territorial subset of the core avifauna, singing observations of these species (n = and Parula to Basileuterus (Ridgely and Greenfield 2001).…”