Sexing Adult Pale-Winged Starlings Using Morphometric and Discriminant Function Analysis

Laurence Henry (1) , Veronique Biquand (1) , Adrian J. F. K. Craig (2) , Martine Hausberger (1)

1 EthoS - Ethologie animale et humaine
2 Rhodes University, Grahamstown

Accurate sexing of birds is vital for behavioral studies but can be a real problem in the field, especially for monomorphic species. Our goal here was to characterize the morphology of male and female monomorphic pale-winged starlings (Onychognathus nabouroup), a South African sturnid whose plumage is sexually monomorphic. Morphological measurements of genetically sexed animals indicated that males were statistically larger than females for five measurements: Mass, tail length, tarsus length and wing length. By using a Discriminant Function Analysis based on the measurements taken by one ringer, we were able to predict correctly the sex of 81.10% of the birds of data collected in the field and 77.9% of museum skins independently of year of capture and ringer. The model developed here should be useful for further field studies of this species

Keywords: Starlings; Feathers; Museum collections; Morphometry; Birds; Wings; Bird genetics; Tails

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]; Animal biology; Vertebrate Zoology

Laurence Henry, Veronique Biquand, Adrian J. F. K. Craig, Martine Hausberger. Sexing Adult Pale-Winged Starlings Using Morphometric and Discriminant Function Analysis. PLoS ONE, 2015, 10 (9), pp.e0135628. ⟨10.1371/journal.pone.0135628⟩. ⟨hal-01205355⟩