Experimentally induced flight costs do not lead to increased reliance on supplemental food in winter by a small songbird

Each year hundreds of millions of people intentionally feed wild animals throughout the world. For decades, concerns have persisted regarding the potential for intentional feeding to promote dependency on human-supplemented food, particularly during energetically demanding periods of the annual cycle. In this study, we evaluated whether individuals subjected to experimentally increased flight costs responded by increasing their use of supplemental feeders in a wild, free-ranging population of the Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus). We subjected 67 RFID-tagged chickadees to one of three handicapping treatments (heavy feather-clipping, light feather-clipping, or unclipped controls) and then evaluated feeder use of each individual relative to their pre-treatment level. Contrary to predictions, we found that chickadees in both feather-clipping treatments exhibited a short-term reduction in feeder use, returning to feeding levels of unmanipulated controls within approximately 2 we...