Methods

1 quail egg and 1 plasticine egg was placed in half of the nests, and the remaining nests contained only 1 quail egg as a control. Plasticine eggs were manufactured by hand to have the dimensions of a reference quail egg ( 3.5cm long, 2.8cm diameter), and no attempt was made to prevent olfactory cues. The nests were split equally between ground and arboreal locations. Ground nests were placed in, or at the base of trees, where each tree is more than 15m away from any other selected tree. Arboreal nests were mounted to trees using steel wire where necessary, and were all accessible via branches capable of supporting the weight of predators. No attempts were made to disguise, or hide the nests either at ground or arboreal levels.  4 nests were placed in the forest interior and the remaining 4 were placed on the forest edge. For the purposes of the pilot, forest edge was defined as within 10m of the edge of the forest, and forest interior was >100m away from any edge. Nests were considered to be predated if they were missing, broken or otherwise interfered with (e.g bite marks). Nests were examined daily for predation.
The statistical analysis used χ2 tests were performed using R to examine the observed predation from nests containing plasticine eggs to the expected predation (control nests) \cite{team2019}