The following information contains results pertinant to my banding mortality analysis manuscript. I first start with simple results and then move onto more Bayesian specific results.

How many birds died early


Here is a table of how many birds died early and the proportion out of the full data set.
early_death count
no 1162
yes 93
x
7.410359


Range, mean and standard deviation of birds that died early…there were some birds that died the day of banding.
min max mean sd
0 14 6.010753 4.76056

How many birds died the day of banding?

n
10

Breaking it down by year…proportion of mallards that died in the first 14 days.

year no yes total proportion
2022 298 36 334 10.778443
2023 288 18 306 5.882353
2024 315 10 325 3.076923
2025 261 29 290 10.000000

Bander Effects


Number of banders

x
54

There were 40 banders in the “Other” category so total of 104 banders.

Bander specific effects
type count
little to no effect 41
negative effect 10
positive effect 3

The overall grand mean of bander as an effect.

x
0.1025351
Credible intervals for bander as an effect.
x
2.5% -2.065920
50% 0.010329
97.5% 2.708140

Day Effects



The grand overall mean of day

x
0.3563729
Credible intervals:
x
2.5% -1.0466138
50% 0.2850703
97.5% 2.1828808
Day specific means (this is what is graphed on Figure 2)
parameter mean prop type
beta_day[1] -0.0897476 0.4308333 little to no effect
beta_day[2] -0.5568902 0.1450000 negative effect
beta_day[3] 0.2066154 0.3516667 little to no effect
beta_day[4] 0.3463695 0.2766667 little to no effect
beta_day[5] 0.3439163 0.2966667 little to no effect
beta_day[6] 0.2835729 0.3208333 little to no effect
beta_day[7] 1.6557356 0.0116667 positive effect
beta_day[8] 0.9307513 0.0808333 positive effect
beta_day[9] 0.6040686 0.1766667 positive effect
beta_day[10] -0.0939654 0.4150000 little to no effect
beta_day[11] 0.6015502 0.1783333 positive effect
beta_day[12] -0.1121820 0.4100000 little to no effect
beta_day[13] 1.1022250 0.0525000 positive effect
beta_day[14] -0.0011147 0.4908333 little to no effect
beta_day[15] 0.1246881 0.4208333 little to no effect

Weight Effects


parameter mean 2.5% 97.5% prop
beta_weight 0.1721184 -0.039717 0.3903795 0.0533333

Temperature Effects


parameter mean 2.5% 97.5% prop
beta_mean_mintemp_prev5 0.5860384 0.2991818 0.8547854 0

Random effects


parameter mean 2.5% 97.5% prop
mu_state 1.591286 -0.3525296 3.438411 0.0666667
mu_year 1.557906 -0.3743282 3.508136 0.0691667

Figures

Figure 1: Distribution of eastern mallard banding locations from 2022-2025. Hexagons include at least one banding site and were used to reduce specificity regarding waterfowl hotspots in the winter.

Figure 2: Violin plots and predictive plots depicting posterior distributions and predicted daily survival probability. Subplots (a) and (b) show posterior distributions of all banders and days after banding respectively on effects on daily survival. Negative and positive effects are colored based on a p-tail less than or equal to 20%. Subplots (c) and (d) show predicted daily survival for weight at banding and the five day rolling minimum temperature (degrees C), for the average state, average year, and the grand mean of the posteriors for day and bander.