HAS BROOD PARASITISM SELECTED FOR EARLIER NESTING IN THE CALIFORNIA GNATCATCHER?

Abstract

"Reconstructing past selective pressures can be a daunting task, as data are often sparse, unreliable, or inconsistently gathered. Nevertheless, museum collections provide an impressive but all-too-often untapped resource. Data housed in such collections provide an important window to the past and allow us to identify and explore changes in the ecology of a species or a community (Reznick et al. 1994, Smith et al. 1995, Schaffer et al. 1998)."