Do glucocorticoids in droppings reflect baseline level in birds captured in the wild? A case study in snow geese

Baseline glucocorticoid (CORT) levels in plasma are increasingly used as physiological indices of the relative condition or health of individuals and populations. The major limitation is that CORT production is stimulated by the stress associated with capture and handling. Measuring fecal CORT is one way to solve this problem because elevation of fecal CORT usually does not occur before 1-12h after a stressful event in captive animals. However, the effect of capture and handling on fecal CORT levels has seldom been investigated in the wild. In a first experiment, we validated that fecal CORT levels starts to increase in droppings (a mixture of fecal and urinary material) about 1-2h following injection of CORT-release hormone (ACTH) in captive greater snow geese (Chen caerulescens atlantica). In a second experiment, we investigated whether dropping and plasma CORT were related and if the capture affected fecal CORT levels in wild birds. Baseline CORT was obtained by bleeding individuals within 4 min after capture. No relationship was found between baseline and CORT in droppings shortly after capture (<4 min). In addition, CORT levels in droppings increased linearly with time after capture and was already elevated by a factor two 40 min after capture. The different turnover time of CORT between urine and feces could explain such results. We conclude that droppings cannot provide an index of basal CORT levels in snow geese captured in the wild. Such a result contrast with previous studies conducted on habituated, captive animals. We thus recommend that use of droppings as a non-invasive technique to measure baseline CORT be restricted to non-manipulated individuals in the wild.