Daily activity is repeatable but varies across the breeding season in female great tits

Wild animals typically organize activity around a 24-hour day and daily timing across the year is optimized for both survival and reproductive success. Among-individual variation in chronotype, when individuals begin or end their active day relative to a cue such as photoperiod, often exists within a population. Both intrinsic and extrinsic factors contribute to this variation and activity patterns may change across and within different life history stages as energetic investment changes. Here we describe population level changes in female great tit (Parus major) activity patterns of onset and offset of activity as well as assess variation and repeatability in daily activity both within- and across-breeding stages. We fitted individuals with accelerometers to track activity prior to nest building through chick rearing. Prior to clutch initiation females began their active day before sunrise, however in the days prior to laying their first egg, activity was delayed until after sunrise. F..., To observe activity patterns across the season, we focused on five different breeding stages: pre-breeding, pre-laying, egg laying, incubation, and chick rearing. The ‘pre-breeding’ stage included a period of 10 days beginning on day 23 and ending on day 14 prior to the first egg. The ‘pre-laying’ stage was the one-week period (day 8 to day 2) prior to the initiation of egg laying for each individual. It is during this period that the majority of ovarian development and commitment to egg laying should occur (Williams, 2012). The data was then assigned for the period of ‘egg laying’ (including any days in which egg laying was ‘skipped’), ‘incubation’ which was determined by visual confirmation either by finding the female sitting on the eggs or by the eggs being cleared of any nest material and warm to the touch, and finally the ‘chick-rearing’ period which began on hatch day and continued until the BitTag data loggers were collected (See Supplemental Table 2 for sample sizes across stag..., , # Data from: Daily activity is repeatable but varies across the breeding season in female great tits

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7h44j104j](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7h44j104j)

## Description of the data and file structure

Included within this dataset are the daily activity measures and reproductive data used within the publication: “Daily activity is repeatable but varies across the breeding season in female great tits” accepted for publication in Behavioral Ecology.

In this study we fitted individual females with accelerometer data loggers to track activity prior to nest building through chick rearing. We described population level changes in free-living female great tit (*Parus major*) activity patterns of onset and offset of activity as well as assess variation and repeatability in daily activity both within- and across-breeding stages. We also ran a model to investigate co-variation between onset of female activity and nestling mass.

### Files and variables

#### File:...