Are wader nest scrapes adaptively designed to minimize clutch cooling rate?
– Arboreal avian nests likely function partly to insulate clutches. However, reasons for the construction of nest scrapes are poorly understood. Working on Pectoral Sandpipers, Jane Reid tested the hypothesis that using a lined scrape reduces the rate of clutch heat loss & investigated whether scrapes are effectively designed to minimize heat loss rates. The use of both an unlined scrape and of lining material reduced the rate at which a test object lost heat. Constructing a lined scrape is therefore likely to serve to insulate a clutch. The rate of conductive heat loss from within a scrape increased with scrape depth and decreased with lining depth. Convective heat loss increased with wind speed in shallow scrapes but not in deep scrapes. Mean observed scrape depth approximately equaled that which minimized convective cooling while minimizing conductive heat loss. Further, on average, Pectoral Sandpipers used approximately the lining depth that minimized conductive heat loss while min
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