Understory birds play important roles in the dynamic of tropical forests such as seed dispersal, seed predation, and predation of insects and small vertebrates, however, their diversity and behavior has been poorly studied due to their cryptic coloration and elusive habits. The use of camera traps provides the opportunity to study the composition of these communities and their behavior. The objective of the present study was to use camera trap data to describe the composition and activity patterns of the bird communities at two locations, the Los Amigos Biological Station and the Cocha Cashu Biological Station in Madre de Dios, Peru. In Los Amigos, 39 stations were placed with two camera traps each, between August and November each year from 2005 to 2007 for a total of 166 days. In Cocha Cashu, 55 camera stations were installed between June and August in 2011 and 2012 for 67 days in total. We analyzed the activity patterns of the species that were recorded more than 80 times using the overlap package in R which estimates coefficients of overlapping. Trap cameras were installed in different types of forests. Furthermore, we listed types of behavior from images captured in Los Amigos.
Results/Conclusions
We obtained a total of 4725 photographs of birds. These photos recorded 29 species, of which 25 are terrestrial species. 41% of the species registered were omnivores, 24% were insectivores, 24% were frugivores, 7% were carnivores and 2% were granivores. The type of forest with the highest number of species was the ‘low terrace forest’ with 22 species. In the case of Psophia leucoptera (1532 records), its activity begins as soon as the sun rises and has a peak of activity at noon and before twilight. On the other hand, Mitu tuberosum (2354 records) shows a peak of activity in the first hours after dawn, similarly to Tinamus major (95 photos) and Tinamus tao (87 photos). These two Tinamus species show an overlap coefficient of 0.71. Finally, Crypturellus undulatus (97 records) concentrates its activity between 5 and 10 am, whereas Crypturellus soui (81 photos) has a regular activity pattern through the day, therefore, they have an overlap coefficient of 0.65. Eight different types of behaviors were listed, being ‘moving with folded wings’ the most frequent, followed by ‘standing looking at the camera’ and ‘foraging on the ground’.