Learning or just foraging

Female waterfowl home; males do not.

Accordingly, Anderson and I hypothesized that young females should stay longer than young males in the PPR to learn about food resources that could be important for their return in the spring. I have not yet tested the hypothesis. The federal Wingbee data set based on wings from hunter killed birds would provide a good test, as we know date, location, species, sex and age for a huge sample of wings.

So are those young birds learning or just fattening up for migration?