'There's habitat out there that isn't being fully utilized by birds,' said Koper. Electric vehicles would at least cut the noise. Public transit would cut cars on the roads. 'There's quite a lot of things we can do to reduce traffic,' she said. Given a little consideration, Koper said birds will live there. The lesson from the research is that human-impacted environments - even asphalt-covered ones - are not necessarily avian dead zones. 'Maybe it had to do with less roadkill,' Koper suggested. Red-tailed hawks were seen more often along urban-rural margins, but less often near busy roadways. Coots, a white-billed water bird common to sloughs and wetlands, were seen less often.Īnd some species went both up and down, depending on where you looked. 'These common species have been much more impacted by humans than we recognized.' 'Even those species that we think of as being well-adapted to human landscapes are much more sensitive to them than we think,' said Koper. The observation held even with birds that are most commonly seen in built environments - robins, for example. Species were 14 times more likely to show increased rather than decreased counts. 'Almost all the species we studied did change their location,' Koper said.Īlmost always, bird sightings were more abundant post-pandemic. Of the 82 bird species in the study, 80 per cent of them changed their behaviour in places where the pandemic had altered circumstances. 'If the effects are actually due to lockdowns, then we should see the biggest changes in behaviour in the places that have the biggest changes in traffic - close to major roads, airports and in counties that had the strongest lockdowns.' Koper said that the method ensures any changes were due to pandemic measures. They then correlated those sightings with data on COVID-19 restrictions in each county for which they could get information. They located those sightings relative to major roadways, airports, and dense urban environments, compensating statistically for how the pandemic may have affected the behaviour of the birders themselves. The team crunched through 4.3 million individual bird sightings made between March and May from 2017 to 2020 across Canada and the United States. To find answers, Koper and her colleagues looked to eBird, an online collaboration managed by Cornell University that brings together and organizes observations by hundreds of thousands of amateur birdwatchers. traffic before the pandemic compared with during the pandemic.' 'We saw quite strong changes in where birds were seen relative to. Newsletter sign-up: Get The COVID-19 Brief sent to your inbox.

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