Leakage of plastics and other debris from landfills to a highly protected lake by wintering gulls.

General Context: Gulls ingest plastic and other litter while foraging in open landfills, because organic matter is mixed with other debris. Therefore, gulls are potential biovectors of plastic pollution into natural habitats, especially when they concentrate in wetlands for roosting.

Novelty: We quantified, for the first time, the flow of plastic and other anthropogenic debris from open landfills to a natural lake via the movement of gulls.

Flight heights obtained from GPS versus altimeters influence estimates of collision risk with offshore wind turbines in Lesser Black-backed Gulls Larus fuscus.

The risk posed by offshore wind farms to seabirds through collisions with turbine blades is greatly influenced by species-specific flight behaviour. Bird-borne telemetry devices may provide improved measurement of aspects of bird behaviour, notably individual and behaviour specific flight heights. However, use of data from devices that use the GPS or barometric altimeters in the gathering of flight height data is nevertheless constrained by a current lack of understanding of the error and calibration of these methods.

GPS tracking reveals landfill closures induce higher foraging effort and habitat switching in gulls.

Background: Landfills are a major subsidy for some animals, with implications for their life history and demography. Gulls feed extensively on food from landfills and closures are expected to have ecological consequences, but how this influences movement ecology is virtually unknown.

Methods: We used GPS-tracking to quantify foraging behaviour and habitat choice of lesser black-backed gulls (Larus fuscus) breeding at two colonies before and after closure of two nearby landfills.

Better utilisation and transparency of bird data collected by powerline companies.

There is in an ongoing expansion of powerlines as a result of an increasing global demand for energy. Powerlines have the potential to negatively impact wild bird populations through collisions and/or electrocution, and reducing bird powerline collision and electrocution risk is a priority for companies running high-voltage powerlines (known as Transmission System Operators (TSOs)). Most TSOs are legally required to assess any potentially significant impacts via Enivronmental Impact Assessments, and so potentially collect a significant amount of data on the presence of species, species behaviour, and observed mortality rates.

Long-distance migrants vary migratory behaviour as much as short-distance migrants: An individual-level comparison from a seabird species with diverse migration strategies.

As environmental conditions fluctuate across years, seasonal migrants must determine where and when to move without comprehensive knowledge of conditions beyond their current location. Animals can address this challenge by following cues in their local environment to vary behaviour in response to current conditions, or by moving based on learned or inherited experience of past conditions resulting in fixed behaviour across years. It is often claimed that long-distance migrants are more fixed in their migratory behaviour because as distance between breeding and wintering areas increases, reliability of cues to predict distant and future conditions decreases.

Bird and bat species' global vulnerability to collision mortality at wind farms revealed through a trait-based assessment.

Mitigation of anthropogenic climate change involves deployments of renewable energy worldwide, including wind farms, which can pose a significant collision risk to volant animals. Most studies into the collision risk between species and wind turbines, however, have taken place in industrialized countries. Potential effects for many locations and species therefore remain unclear.