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UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Community ecology and logging responses of Southeast Asian woodpeckers (Picidae, Aves) Lammertink, J.M. Publication date 2007 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Lammertink, J. M. (2007). Community ecology and logging responses of Southeast Asian woodpeckers (Picidae, Aves). IBED. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:09 Oct 2021 Community ecology and logging responses of Southeast Asian woodpeckers (Picidae, Aves) ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D. C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op vrijdag 7 december 2007, te 10:00 uur door Jeroen Martjan Lammertink geboren te Amsterdam Promotiecommissie Promotor: Prof. dr. S. B. J. Menken Overige Leden: Prof. dr. H. Winkler Prof. dr. A. M. Cleef Prof. dr. M. W. Sabelis Prof. dr. M. Veith Prof. dr. J. H. D. Wolf Dr. R. W. R. J. Dekker Dr. S. van Balen Faculteit der Natuurwetenschappen, Wiskunde en Informatica 2 Contents Chapter 1: Introduction………………………………………………………………. 5 Chapter 2: A multiple-site comparison of woodpecker communities in Bornean lowland and hill forests…………………………………………………... 11 Chapter 3: Foraging differentiation and mixed flocking in a diverse Bornean woodpecker community………………………………………………….. 31 Chapter 4: Evolution of niche differentiation in Southeast Asian woodpecker communities……………………………………………………………… 51 Chapter 5: Grouping and cooperative breeding in the Great Slaty Woodpecker……. 79 Chapter 6: Global population decline and Red List status of the Great Slaty Woodpecker……………………………………………………………… 95 Chapter 7: Conclusions and directions for further research…………………………. 121 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………… 128 Summary………………………………………………………………… 131 Samenvatting…………………………………………………………… 133 Ringkasan………………………………………………………………… 135 Curriculum Vitae & List of publications………………………………… 137 3 4 Chapter 1 Introduction Buff-necked Woodpecker (Meiglyptes tukki). Sukadana, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. 5 On a spring day in 1996 I was behind my desk at the Zoological Museum in Amsterdam, writing up the results of surveys that I made in Mexico for threatened birds and remnants of old-growth forests. For about 15 seconds Dr Jan Wattel, curator of the bird collection at the museum and my supervisor, stopped by to tell me that the Netherlands Science Foundation (NWO) had issued a call for proposals. NWO was inviting proposals for research on groups of plants or animals that had the potential to measure the impact of habitat disturbance on biodiversity, preferably in Indonesia. Was it not an idea, Wattel asked, for me to write a proposal on Indonesian woodpeckers as indicators for forest disturbance? With that Wattel, who moves and thinks about twice as fast as the average human being, zipped out of the room again. As I pondered the proposition, I was not immediately enthusiastic. The attractive part, of course, was the possibility that I could continue to work on woodpeckers. I had grown up following a small population of banded Black Woodpeckers in a coastal nature reserve in the Netherlands, had searched for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Cuba, and as part of my MSc work in Mexico I had re-constructed the extinction process of the Imperial Woodpecker. Woodpecker research had an engrained lure to me, and in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia more species of woodpeckers co-exist than anywhere else on Earth. However in the books that I consulted, drawings of many of the Asian woodpeckers did not look all that appealing. There was for instance the ungainly Great Slaty Woodpecker with a drab grey coloration and a ridiculous thin neck, a far cry from the boldly black-and-white, wild-crested Campephilus and Dryocopus woodpeckers that I hoped to study next in South America. Having spent nearly two years in Cuba and Mexico, I had become fluent in Spanish, an asset I was inclined to make use of. Whereas in Latin America chatting about the Dutch soccer team and windmills created an instant friendly disposition in total strangers, Indonesia and the Netherlands had a long and sometimes ugly colonial history together. With five former classmates working in Indonesia, that country appeared already overcrowded with Dutch biologists. Last but not least, the disease-ridden, dark forbidding jungles of Indonesia appeared a rather intimidating place to do several years of field research. Despite my mixed initial reactions about woodpecker research in Indonesia, I continued reading about the Southeast Asian region and looking at maps. In the arch of islands that stretches between the Asian mainland and Australia, woodpeckers are found in the west only. They reach their highest species richness on the large islands and peninsula of the archipelago: Sumatra, Borneo and Java, and the peninsula shared between Malaysia and southernmost Thailand and Myanmar. Between these islands and the peninsula there are a great many small islands, and sea depth is shallow. During periodic ice ages, with the most recent ice age about 10,000 years ago, sea levels dropped and the sea floor in the western Indo-Malayan archipelago fell dry. The exposed land became covered with forests and savannahs that facilitated exchange of plants and animals between the former islands. After sea levels rose again, the re-formed islands, large and small, started out with the same set of species. The smaller islands lost a subset of the shared species pool through local extinctions in the course of time. The larger islands with vast forests maintained most of these species up to the present. During the 20th century, with the invention of the bulldozer and chainsaw, the destruction of the rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia began. In the course of this destruction, large and small fragments of forest were formed out of the forests that once blanketed the larger islands. Just as happened after sea level rise 10,000 years earlier, the small man-made fragments lost species out of the shared species pool through local extinctions, whereas the larger fragments as yet maintained the full set of species. 6 It dawned on me that as a by-product of geological and human history, we had an accidental biological experiment under way here on the grandest scale. Research on a selected group of species in the three settings -large forest areas, small forest fragments, and small islands- could show not only through what ecological differences species co-existed in the tropical rainforest, but also whether these differences changed over two very different time scales: the time since species were lost in recent fragments, and the time since they were lost from small islands. If they changed after species went missing, how much? How much on different time scales? And in what direction: towards the vacant niches of missing species, or in random directions? Answers to these questions could provide new insight in the evolution of co-existence of species in tropical forests, which in turn could provide a deep understanding of the responses of species to forest disturbance, fulfilling the theme of the NWO programme. Figure 1. Fragmentation of Sundaic lowland forests from geological and human causes. (A) During the last glacial maximum sea level was ca. 120 m lower than at present. Exposed land connected present-day islands. Location and extent of savannah vegetation during this period is uncertain. Lowland forests during this time included dipterocarp rainforests as well as dry forest types. Map after E. Meijaard (Journal of Biogeography 30: 1245-1257, 2003). (B). After post-glacial sea level rise the familiar present outlines of Sumatra, Borneo, Java and the Thai-Malay-Myanmar peninsula appeared. Numerous small islands were formed. Lowland forests became nearly all dipterocarp rainforest. (C) As a consequence of human population growth and mechanized deforestation, much of the lowland rainforest has now been cleared. In the process of forest clearing small forest fragments have been formed in the lowlands. Forest cover data courtesy of E. Colijn/The Gibbon Foundation. Delving into the scientific literature on the effects of forest fragmentation and on the distribution of birds in Indonesia, I found out that between Indonesian large forest areas, fragments, and small islands, woodpeckers indeed showed the expected variations of rich and poor sets of species drawn from the same original species pool. No such situation exists anywhere else on Earth. As it happens, woodpeckers