From a sequential pattern, temporal adjustments emerge in hummingbird traplining.

Animals that feed from resources that are constant in space and that refill may benefit from repeating the order in which they visit locations. This is a behavior known as traplining, a spatial phenomenon. Hummingbirds, like other central-place foragers, use short traplines when moving between several rewarding sites. Here we investigated whether traplining hummingbirds also use relevant temporal information when choosing which flowers to visit. Wild rufous hummingbirds that were allowed to visit three artificial flower patches in which flowers were refilled 20 minutes after they had been depleted, repeated the order in which they visited the three patches. Although they tended to visit the first two patches sooner than 20 minutes, they visited the third patch at approximately 20 minutes intervals. The time between visits to the patches increased across the experiment, suggesting that the birds learned to wait longer before visiting a patch. The birds appeared to couple the sequential pattern of a trapline with temporal regularity, to some degree. This suggests that there is a temporal component to the repeated spatial movements flown by foraging wild hummingbirds. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.