Summary

1. Contrary to the generally high level of natal philopatry (i.e. likelihood that individuals breed at their natal colony) found in first-breeding colonial birds, little is known of natal philopatry later in life.Most hypotheses advanced to explain natal philopatry are valid at all ages.However, for young and inexperienced birds, the benefits of natal philopatry may be counterbalanced by the costs of intraspecific competition at the natal colony making dispersal temporarily advantageous. In turn, experiencemay increase competitive ability andmake natal philopatry advantageous again. 2. We evaluated this hypothesis on the large-scale dispersal of greater flamingos Phoenicopterus roseus breeding among three colonies comprising>85 % of the Western Mediterranean meta-population. The Camargue (France) and Fuente de Piedra (Spain) are large and saturated colonies whileMolentargius (Sardinia) is a recent and growing colony. 3. We used a 20-year capture-mark-resighting dataset of 4900 flamingos ringed as chicks in Camargue and Fuente de Piedra and breeding at the three colonies.We assessed the effects of natal colony and breeding experience (first-time observed breeders versus confirmed experienced breed-ers) on dispersal using multistate capture-recapture models. Dispersal to an unobservable stat