Interactions between People and Birds in Urban Landscapes

Abstract

Abstract. A large body of work over the past few decades has revealed the manifestly dramatic impacts of urbanization on species' distributions and ecologies, many of which result from gross changes in land use and configuration. Less well understood are the rather more direct interactions between people and biodiversity in the urban arena. While there is a general concern that urbanization impoverishes human contact with nature, daily interaction with biodiversity in urban greenspaces and the widespread provision of food and nesting resources for wildlife form a part of many city-dwellers' experience. Using data from the UK, we show that supplementary resource provision aimed explicitly at enhancing avian populations can result in high levels of additional foraging and nesting opportunities, particularly in urban areas. However, our data also indicate that levels of such resource provision are strongly positively correlated with human population density at a regional scale, and within a large city. The proportion of households participating in bird feeding depends on social and economic features of the human population, suggesting that strong covariation between human and ecological communities will result. Indeed, we demonstrate that the abundances of some urban-adapted bird species are positively related to the density of feeding stations across the urban landscape, although such relationships were not apparent for other species that commonly use garden feeding stations. It has been suggested that interactions with nature, such as feeding birds, could have beneficial consequences for human health. A better understanding of this potential feedback is required.

The causal response of avian communities to suburban development: a quasi-experimental, longitudinal study

“…6) in the moderately settled suburban and exurban Seattle study areas. Given the high density of people in the portions of Seattle where we documented the least provisioning of birds, our estimates of human engagement in the Seattle region as a whole are likely to be underestimates (Lepczyk et al 2004;Fuller et al 2012). We suggest that diversity and human engagement are causally and reciprocally linked Fuller et al 2012).…”

“…The data we presented here suggests that both reproduction and survival of birds responds to human action. Provisioning bird food, and to a lesser extent, nest boxes, increases the carrying capacity of developments for exploiters and adapters (Fuller et al 2008(Fuller et al , 2012Robb et al 2008a). This local numerical response may result from some combination of enhanced overwinter survival (Brittingham and Temple 1988), improved condition (Grubb and Cimprich 1990), earlier breeding (Robb et al 2008b), and reduced competition for a virtually unlimited food supply.…”

Habitat selection by an avian top predator in the tropical megacity of Delhi: human activities and socio-religious practices as prey-facilitating tools

“…While several previous studies have investigated the effect of human subsidies on urban taxa, they have usually focused on garden-feeding operated by citizens of the northern hemisphere as a leisure activity (e.g. Fuller et al 2012;Cox and Gaston 2016). In our case, the spatial association of ritualized-feeding with certain religious communities completed the picture of these previous studies by adding a further socio-cultural component, which strongly characterizes the urban settings of large portions of southern Asia (see also Keniger et al 2013).…”

“…In our system, Delhi kites cannot be thought of in isolation from humans and their voluntary and involuntary subsidies, which would qualify them as anthropophilic and anthropodependent species (sensu Hulme-Beaman et al 2016). While the importance of human subsidies in altering the mosaic of foraging opportunities for animals is well appreciated (Fuller et al 2012;Oro et al 2013;Newsome et al 2014), in our case the subsidy-mosaic was uniquely tied to a complex array of human themes, such as (1) the Indian-level and local-level history of Muslim displacements, which followed India's independence and which determined the current distribution of Muslim colonies; (2) the global economy that drives urban sprawl, as well as the local economics of trade, which influenced the stability of some historical Muslim colonies; (3) the municipal planning of the currently skyrocketing urban expansion, which affects road and vegetation arrangement, as Fig. 3 Access to dense Muslim colonies was higher at Black Kite nests (black bars) than at random locations (white bars) when local hygiene levels were high, while inefficient refuse disposal (i.e.…”

“…Second, their abundance and frequent commensalism with humans makes them an integral part of the human cultural landscape, potentially making them important components of people's sense of connection with nature (e.g. Nilon 2011;Fuller et al 2012;Cox and Gaston 2016). Third, many of them are facultative scavengers that subsist on animal carrion and human waste, thus providing fundamental ecosystem and sanitary services, as well demonstrated in urban and rural environments (e.g.…”