Foraging behavior of nectarivorous birds in Santa Teresa – ES
Abstract
Santa Teresa city, ES, is the place of the highest diversity of hummingbirds in Brazilian tropical forests. Then, it was chosen to the accomplishment of a census of nectar-feeding bird species and the description of the foraging behavior under a focal and uniform source of artificial resource, aiming to evidence the territorial behavior of resource defense and to verify its relationship with the body weight of these birds. We observed 13 species of the family Trochilidae and 1 of the family Coerebidae. The results show for all the 14 species of nectar-feeding birds watched there is a positive highly significant dependence, tested by logistic regression, between the display of an aggressive resource-defense behavior and the body weight of the observed birds. So, these founds may be linked to the theory that the high metabolic ratios in lower body weight organisms may restrict energy allocation to resource defense, favoring the foraging instead.
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