2020. Birds By Big Buildings Behave Bolder
December 18, 2020
Open gallery
Much like humans, country birds like to be left alone, and don’t let humans get as close as their city bird counterparts.
By Joe Zippelli and Zach Mitchell
In this paper the group goes over the behavioral trait that is boldness. Specifically to see if there was a measurable difference of boldness between populations of rural birds vs. urban birds. In order to begin the search for a difference let alone find a difference they first needed a way to measure/record boldness of the birds. What they decided to use was Flight initiation Distance (FID) which is a measurement of the closest distance that the bird will allow a human to approach before flying away. They hypothesized that the birds in more urban communities would be used to humans and human made infrastructure and would allow for a closer FID while the mostly undisturbed rural birds wouldn’t allow for close FIDs. By testing the FID on birds at 2 rural and 2 urban areas they were able to find that the desensitized urban birds had a lower FID.