Suchergebnisse

Acknowledgements We thank everyone who helped with fieldwork, particularly Sue Bignal for her ongoing efforts on Islay, and David Jardine, Mike Peacock and Neil Metcalfe for providing information from Colonsay. We thank all landowners and farmers who allowed access to nest sites. We thank Scottish Natural Heritage, and particularly Rae McKenzie, for their ongoing support, and thank the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for their generous logistical support for AET and JMR. We thank Tom Pennycott and John Mould for undertaking veterinary post-mortems of blind nestlings, and Islay Veterinary Surgery for their help. AET was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and Scottish Natural Heritage, JMR was funded by the Royal Society, and DMcC was funded by the Scottish Government Rural Affairs & Environment Portfolio Strategic Research Programme 2011–2016, Theme 1: Ecosystem Services & Biodiversity. Data accessibility Data on occurrences of blindness in affected families are available in the Supporting Information. All other data associated with this article are available at the Dryad Digital Repository http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.57t89 (Trask et al. 2016). ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF

Acknowledgements The long-term study could not have been achieved without long-term support from numerous people, including Islay farmers and land-owners who facilitated access to nest sites and observation locations; all current and previous members of the Scottish Chough Forum; and NatureScot and RSPB (summarised in Appendix S2). We particularly thank Rae McKenzie of NatureScot, without whose enthusiasm and willingness to engage with apparently abstract ideas we would likely never have got beyond phase 1. Aspects of the work were funded by Natural Environment Research Council, NatureScot, University of Aberdeen, University of Glasgow, RSPB, Scottish Government's Strategic Research Programme, Scotland's Rural College, Killam Trusts and the Royal Society (details in Appendix S2). We thank David Jardine for his valuable contributions, and Rae McKenzie, Jess Shaw and Morven Laurie (NatureScot), and Jen Smart, Gillian Gilbert, Jack Fleming and Paul Walton (RSPB) for commenting on a manuscript draft. ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF

Acknowledgements We thank all Islay landowners and farmers who allowed access to nest sites and supported supplementary feeding, especially Donald Jones and Robert and Tom Epps, and everyone who contributed to fieldwork and data collection. We thank NatureScot for funding supplementary feeding, led by Rae McKenzie, Jess Shaw and Des Thompson, and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for logistic support. This work was supported by a Natural Environment Research Council iCASE studentship (NE/P009719/1) with NatureScot, and the Scottish Government's 2011-2016 and 2016-2021 Strategic Research Programmes. Open access via Wiley agreement. ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF