Female Soay sheep do not adjust their maternal care behaviour to the quality of their home range

Resource availability, through its impact on the costs and benefits of parental care, is expected to influence parental care behaviour. There has, to our knowledge, been no attempt to understand how variation in the resource use of wild individuals influences individual parental care behaviour. To understand how natural resource variability affects maternal care in female St. Kilda Soay sheep, we selected 69 females whose home ranges varied in quality (measured as the mean percentage cover of Holcus lanatus), and recorded the behaviour of each individual and her lamb over the period of maternal care. Home range quality did not influence suckling or non-suckling behaviours of the female or her lamb, suggesting that maternal care did not vary with a female’s access to resources. Growth rate analyses confirmed the behavioural results, with no association between home range quality and the weight gain of lambs between birth and weaning. This work suggests that female Soay sheep faced with p...