Northern Flickers increase provisioning rates to raise more but poorer quality offspring when given experimentally enlarged broods

Brood enlargement experiments have been conducted in several species of birds to investigate how parents of both sexes adjust their investment in the current breeding attempt. We studied parental feeding effort in the Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus), a species with partially reversed sex roles where males invest more in parental care than females and in which there is facultative polyandry and no extra-pair young. By experimentally...