Sentences with phrase «annual molting»

After a successful breeding season — during which we welcomed a new rockhopper chick into our care — both the rockhopper and Magellanic penguins are in various stages of their annual molt, a process that will span several weeks.

Migratory birds desert their offspring to molt: When parental care and the annual molt overlap in time, a migratory songbird often chooses single - parent desertion.»

The new study, published in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, a journal of the American Ornithological Society, examines the trade - offs that birds make when parental care overlaps with the annual molt.

This radical solution to conflict between parental care and the annual molt provides «a nice illustration of the complex lives that migratory songbirds lead,» says Ron Mumme, the study's author and Professor of Biology at Allegheny College in northwestern Pennsylvania.

After spending a relatively leisurely winter and early spring luxuriating in warm tropical climates, they migrate north for a brief but highly eventful summer in North America, during which they must complete three energetically demanding and time - consuming tasks: (1) they must build nests, lay eggs, and provide for their offspring until the young reach independence, (2) they must completely replace all the feathers in their plumage as part of the annual molt, and (3) they must prepare for the fall southward migration by eating prodigiously and storing the body fat that will fuel their long - distance flights.

Not exact matches

«Whereas the avian annual cycle may be synchronized to segregate the major energy - demanding functions of molt, migration and reproduction, we recognize that events during any one phase of the annual cycle have repercussions across the entire annual cycle,» adds Frank Moore of the University of Southern Mississippi, the ornithologist who first outlined the two hypotheses.