Search and Prey Detection by Foraging Sparrows

The conventional ecological approach to predation provides a limited framework for understanding perceptual and tactical mechanisms of search and detection and their dynamical consequences. In constrast, models developed to guide naval search operations are "spatiotemporal dynamic interaction models," analogous to those developed in plant population ecology. Our application of these modes to foraging sparrows indicates that perceptual and tactical constraints play a critical role in the allocation of search effort across habitat patches, in the choice of tactics within patches, and in the predation dynamics that emerge over time. Sparrows search where prey are most detectable rather than where they are most abundant, and they tune search tactics to preceptual operating conditions. The approach describes and predicts details of search and detection, cumulative harvest rates, and selectivities more accurately than the conventional search—efficiency approach.