Cat colonies and flight initiation distances of urban birds: Dealing with conflicting sources of citizen wellbeing

Flight initiation distance and refuge in urban birds

“…Among the environmental factors affecting FID, many studies have focused on the characteristics of habitat related to a degree of urbanization (Samia et al, 2017), interactions between predators and prey (Møller, 2008b), predator abundance (Díaz et al, 2022(Díaz et al, , 2013, level of stress of individuals (Tablado et al, 2021), as well as the time of day and season when FID is measured (Mikula et al, 2018;Piratelli et al, 2015). FID could be modulated by food abundance, being shorter in areas with lower food availability (Møller et al, 2015).…”

Lockdown effects on fear revealed direct and indirect effects of human presence on perceived predation risk

“…urban parks). We were thus able to sample during (2020) and after (2021) the Covid-19 lockdown the same areas we sampled before lockdown (2018) in previous studies (Díaz et al, 2013(Díaz et al, , 2021(Díaz et al, , 2022. Paired comparisons according to study sites (see below) control for among-sites (cities and surrounding rural areas) variation in other factors potentially influencing FIDs, such as vegetation structure, human population density or the level of governmental restrictions (Díaz et al, 2022;Mikula et al, 2022;Morelli et al, 2022).…”

“…components such as climate change and pollution in complex ways (Matesanz et al 2009;Díaz et al, 2022). The effects of Anthropocene on local diversity is generally assumed to be negative (Sol et al 2014;Ibañez-Alamo et al 2017;Morelli et al 2021a), although recent work demonstrates that responses may vary considerably both geographically and for particular species or species groups (Atwell et al, 2012;Díaz et al, 2013;Møller and Díaz 2018a,b;Morelli et al 2020Morelli et al , 2021bOrdóñez-Delgado et al 2022).…”

“…These differences are not expected in a scenario of direct effects of human disturbance, that would lead to either increased, decreased or invariant FIDs across habitats, bird locations and singing behaviors (Díaz et al, 2013;Samia et al, 2015;Mikula et al, 2022). Specifically, we expected a) differential lockdown effects in urban as compared to nearby rural habitats, with stronger changes in the latter due to lower sensitivity of urban bird populations to changes in environmental conditions (Díaz et al, 2021); b) lack of changes in height above ground of birds when flushed if lockdown decreased direct human disturbance effects, and increased height in the urban an decreased height in rural habitats if effects were mediated by predator release (ground-dwelling predators are prevalent in urban habitats whereas aerial predators prevail in rural habitats; Møller, 2011;Díaz et al, 2022); c) stronger responses to lockdown by non-singing (i.e., foraging or resting) birds than by singing birds, due to constraints imposed by selection of optimal singing heights (Møller, 2011); d) differential adjustments of vertical and horizontal components of FID if predator release is at stake, by increasing the latter according to the former (i.e. longer horizontal FIDs when individuals perch higher) according to lockdown, habitat and singing behavior (Møller, 2010;Díaz et al, 2021); no adjustments, or invariant adjustments according to habitat and singing behavior, are expected under an scenario of direct disturbance effects; and e) delayed effects of lockdown on FIDs to the year after lockdown, as compared with pre-lockdown conditions, if disturbance, predation or food conditions during lockdown had lasting effects of bird behavior (Møller et al, 2013;Gotanda, 2020).…”

Changing urban bird diversity: how to manage adaptively our closest relation with wildlife

“…FIDs are good predictors of bird abundance and population trends at several spatial and temporal scales, at least in Europe Møller and Díaz 2018a). Easy large-scale replication, direct link with key demographic and life-history traits (Sol et al 2018) and close relation with population size and trends make analyses of bird scape behaviour a popular and powerful tool for analysing bird responses to urbanization and other related man-made factors (Díaz et al 2013(Díaz et al , 2021a(Díaz et al , 2022.…”