Local density shapes complete brood failure across species boundaries in two sympatric songbirds

Abstract

Reproduction in species with parental care involves sustaining a brood of offspring through an energetically demanding period, when shifts in resource availability, weather, predation risk, and parental condition can strongly alter offspring survival. The most extreme outcome is complete brood failure (death of all offspring), which is relatively frequent in many bird species and may occur when conditions cross a viability threshold. Although complete brood failure is important for shaping fitness variation and population dynamics, we have limited understanding of how intra- and interspecific density dependence governs these events, or of how factors such as habitat quality and disease burden contribute to them, because deriving this requires fine-scale, individual-level data collected across generations for multiple overlapping species. Using a dataset totalling 38,509 nesting attempts from great tits (Parus major) and blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) in Wytham Woods, Oxford, UK, we examined how brood failure is shaped by local conspecific and heterospecific density, habitat structure, and avian malaria infection for a subset. Complete brood failure was frequent (14.75%), mostly involving chick mortality in the nest consistent with starvation, rather than brood removal by predators. Relationships between density and brood failure were strong but species-specific. Specifically, great tit failure risk was higher in neighbourhoods that remained densely populated across years, whereas blue tit failure risk was lower where annual great tit or combined density was high, but not where annual blue tit density itself was high. This suggests that local overall density reflects continuing constraint for great tits, while local annual density may partly track favourable within-year conditions and settlement patterns for blue tits. In great tits, failure was also more common where oak density was low and farther from the closest river (Thames), while habitat associations were weak in blue tits. Malaria infection was spatially heterogeneous and covaried with density and habitat, but infection status did not significantly explain complete brood failure. Together, these results show that complete brood failure is shaped by spatially structured local ecological context, and how density dependence in these events can differ in direction and timescale between sympatric species.