What Determines Bird Beauty in Human Eyes?

Abstract

Some authors have argued that human preferences for "beautiful" birds may skew the selection of species used to promote conservation programs. This evokes questions about the importance of color, shape, and other appearance traits of bird in affecting human preferences for birds. The aim of this study was to assess the traits affecting human preferences towards all non-passerine and five passerine bird families (n = 102), and to see whether such preferences correspond within a family or are species-specific. Using an Internet survey, we asked 200 human respondents to evaluate pictures of bird species, with two randomly chosen from each family, according to their attractiveness. The respondents were mainly from the Czech and Slovak Republics, but 67 came from other countries (the majority of which were English-speaking). An additional 100 respondents, exclusively from the Czech and Slovak Republics, evaluated the same pictures converted to silhouettes, to test the effect of shape versus color. We included various factors such as morphometric traits (i.e., measurements of body segments and the area the bird silhouette filled in the picture), body weight of the species, and colors, lightness, and saturation of the pictures in the statistical analyses, to help explain any variation in human preferences. We found that human preferences were significantly affected by bird morphology; however, the colors blue and yellow, as well as the overall lightness, were significant as well. The preferences for species belonging to the same family were positively correlated, possibly due to similarity in the body shape of related species. We suggest that finding the traits that determine human preferences toward birds may help conservationists promote a conservation program based on the selection of the correct, scientifically determined, flagship species.

Computational color combination analysis of Papilionidae butterflies as aesthetic objects

“…The proportions under 3% were excluded from the analysis because they were considered to be almost imperceptible. 38 Additionally, the boundaries of colors on butterflies are often not sharp. Thus, we regarded the mixture components that had a large variance as indicating gradation.…”

“…These three variables, respectively, represent the color, size, and range in each Gaussian mixture component. The proportions under 3% were excluded from the analysis because they were considered to be almost imperceptible . Additionally, the boundaries of colors on butterflies are often not sharp.…”

A scoping review into the impact of animal imagery on pro-environmental outcomes

“…As an example of anthropomorphism, greater body mass and bigger and forward-facing eyes have been found to guide preferences (Tisdell and Wilson 2006;Martín-López et al 2007;Knegterin et al 2010;Veríssimo et al 2018). Similarly, a human preference for baby schema may influence judgement of bird silhouettes also, with short necks and big eyes being the most appealing traits (Lišková and Frynta 2013). There is a limited evidence base on which to judge the role of anthropomorphism in influencing behaviour or even attitudes towards biodiversity, however, particularly in the case of biological groups such as plants that commonly receive less public attention (Root-Bernstein et al 2013).…”

Assessment of social perception of an invasive parakeet using a novel visual survey method

“…Several studies have highlighted the usefulness of adopting a visual approach when studying people's preference for nature or biodiversity (e.g. Bayne et al 2012, Shwartz et al 2013a, Lišková and Frynta 2013, but this has only rarely been done for invasive species (Lindemann-Matthies 2016). Here we used a rather novel approach to investigate people´s perception of a focal non-native species, by presenting an image of it mixed with those of other species and then asking people to select a fixed-number subset of species they prefer.…”