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In order to reproduce successfully in a temporally varying environment, iteroparous animals must exhibit considerable behavioural flexibility across their lifetimes. By adjusting timing of breeding each year, parents can ensure optimal overlap between the energy intensive period of offspring production and the seasonal peak in favourable environmental conditions, thereby increasing their chances of successfully rearing young.

Few studies investigate variation among individuals in how they respond to fluctuating conditions, or how selection acts on these individual differences, but this information is essential for understanding how populations will cope with rapid environmental change.

We explored inter‐annual trends in breeding time and individual responses to environmental variability in common guillemots Uria aalge, an important marine top predator in the highly variable California Current System …