I thought this article was interesting and something we should encourage during Bluebird nesting season.
https://www.birdwatchingdaily.com/news/ ... parasites/“When the nestlings were not fed, every nest had parasites, with up to 125 flies in a single nest,” Knutie says. “When the nestlings had been fed, I found very few or no parasites. These results suggest that food supplementation could be increasing the birds’ ability to kill the parasites.”
Next, Knutie wanted to explore why this trend is seen with supplemented birds. She looked to the antibody response in the nestlings, which could be helping the birds kill the parasites.
“With unsupplemented nestlings, there is a low-to-no detectable antibody response. With supplemented nestlings, there was a significantly higher antibody response,” she says. “Higher antibody levels mean fewer parasites.”
This could be attributable to the birds having more nutrient resources to devote to mounting a response sooner in life than the unsupplemented cohort. With an immune response, the parasites are killed. The timing of the feeding therefore seems important; feeding earlier in the breeding season benefits the young birds more than later in the season.
“If food availability is driving the nestlings’ immune response to parasites, feeding early could really help the birds,” Knutie says.
