Sinks, sources, and spotted owls: a territorial population model with continuous mortality and discrete birth

A model is developed for the dynamics of a territorial population for which mortality and the search for suitable territories are treated as continuous processes and birth occurs as a discrete pulse once each year. It is shown that the trajectories converge either to a fixed annual cycle or to extinction for both groups as long as the individual reproductive success and survival rate for the territorial population exceeds that for those individuals not holding territories. Conditions that determine whether the population will persist are provided.