“Dead birds flying”: Can North American rehabilitated raptors released into the wild mitigate anthropogenic mortality?

As the human footprint expands to meet societal energy needs, so do the impacts on wildlife. Raptors in particular are highly susceptible to anthropogenic caused mortality. Industry sectors are encouraged to offset these causes of mortality. Several options to mitigate these losses have been proposed, including raptor rehabilitation. However, its role as a conservation tool is untested. Currently, no peer-reviewed demographic analyses exist using post-release data from rehabilitated raptors to evaluate its effectiveness at continental scales. Our objectives were to estimate annual survival of rehabilitated and wild raptors, and then use those estimates in demographic models to assess potential effects at individual and population levels. We hypothesized that rehabilitated raptors would survive similarly to their wild counterparts after an acclimation period, and that longer-lived species (K-selected) would benefit most from these releases. We used U.S. Geological Survey Bird Banding Lab..., , , # “Dead birds flying”: Can North American rehabilitated raptors released into the wild mitigate anthropogenic mortality?

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.np5hqc01p](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.np5hqc01p)

Provided are the m-arrrays used to estimate survival of 17 North American raptor species from 1974-2018. Age classes were amalgamated into First year (FY) and after First year (AFY). See article for details. These files are designed to run the analyses on each species individually and are identified as such, where there are 4 \"recovery matrix groups\" indicated for each species. This formatting is the requirement of Program MARK. To run an individual species the user will need to copy and paste the 4 m-arrays into a new file and run it from there.

## Description of the data and file structure

These m-arrays are formatted to run in the mark-recovery models in Program MARK (or R-mark). They can be run through either the Seber parametrization (preferred as these species are not hu...