Plan ahead, or wing it? How storm-petrel parents adjust food delivery to young chicks

Parents must decide how to allocate energy gained from foraging between self and offspring. Storm-petrels (Procellariiformes: Hydrobatidae) are pelagic seabirds that travel hundreds of kilometers across multiple days before returning to the nesting burrow to feed a dependent chick. Parents return to the nest with food stored in the proventriculus, a portion of which is regurgitated to their offspring. As the chick grows, provisioning demands increase. However, it is unknown whether parents meet this increasing demand by (1) altering their foraging strategies to acquire more food or (2) allocating a greater proportion of their intake to the chick. We designed, validated, and implemented a new technology—the Burrow Scale Monitor—to measure Leach’s storm-petrels (Hydrobates leucorhous) as they entered and exited the nesting burrow. We monitored breeding adults over the first 30 days of chick rearing to determine whether storm-petrel parents adjust their foraging intake to the age of the ch..., , # Data from: Plan ahead, or wing it? How storm-petrel parents adjust food delivery to young chicks

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.z8w9ghxsv](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.z8w9ghxsv)

## Description of the data and file structure

We developed the Burrow Scale Monitor to passively measure adult mass of Leach's storm-petrels as they entered and exited their nesting burrow. We used these data to detect food delivery by parents to a single chick in the nesting burrow and the proportion of arrival weight that was allocated to the chick to test the parental strategy behind food allocation to chick or self. Data were collected at the Bowdoin Scientific Station at Kent Island, NB, Canada from 8 July to 9 August 2024.

### Files and variables

* BEHECO-2025-0162_Main_Paper 
* This is the data file on which all of the analyses presented to test the hypothesis addressed in the paper are based. Missing values are designated by \"NA\" for importing into R.
* The fields include:
* Burrow: ID for ...,