Abstract:Changes in environmental temperature may affect the wintering behaviors of birds and alter their home range sizes. It is important to understand how these three factors interact to influence the ability of birds to meet their physiological needs. In this paper, the detailed data of locations of 31 whooper swans (Cygnus cygnus) wintering in Sanmenxia Wetland of Henan Province were obtained by satellite tracking, and we used kernel density estimation to calculate the home range size of whooper swans by ArcGIS and R, Spearman correlation was used to determinate the relationship between mean temperature and home range size by SPSS, and the behavior observation data of swans were obtained by instantaneous scanning method, the Kruskal Wallis test was used to analyze the significant difference of behavioral patterns. According to the daily average temperature of our study area, the whole winter period was divided into three periods (Fig. 1). The results showed that there were noticeable differences in the wintering behaviors of the swans, including feeding, locomotion and resting form the early to late winter periods, related to the decreasing and increasing environmental temperature (Table 1). As winter behaviors changed, the home range sizes of the swans also altered (Table 2). The sizes of core area and whole home range in different winter periods were positively correlated with temperatures. Additionally, home range sizes at different time intervals changed greatly with the change in temperatures (Fig. 2). In the early winter, the variation in the behaviors of the swans mainly reflected the need to supplement energy to increase physical fitness and home range sizes increased. In the mid-winter period, movement was reduced to maintain energy and the home range sizes decreased. In the late winter, the home range sizes increased to allow for greater circling flights and foraging to improve migration ability. In conclusion, this study found that changes were made by swans to their wintering behaviors and home range sizes to meet their physiological demands during different winter periods.