Birds took advantage of lockdowns by hanging out in the city, study finds

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As human movements were restricted to limit the spread of covid-19 in early 2020, dozens of bird species became more abundant in urban centres in the US and Canada.

Nicola Koper at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, and her colleagues analysed 4.3 million observations made by volunteer birdwatchers to compare numbers during the pandemic restrictions with those in previous years.

“The pandemic created a unique—hopefully—opportunity to understand the effects of traffic separated from the effects of the human-altered landscape at a scale that would be impossible under any other circumstances,” says study author Nicola Koper, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Manitoba.

To gather enough data to draw meaningful conclusions, a team of researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and various Canadian universities needed boots on the ground across the continent.

The researchers pulled data from the popular app eBird, a citizen science initiative led by the Cornell Ornithological Institute that allows birdwatchers to log what they see in a format that’s easy for educators, scientists, and other birders to access and analyze. 

The results suggest many species respond quickly to even modest changes in human traffic—with important implications for conservation.  

Sources - 1, 2, 3