How urban and rural birds respond to the colour of bird feeders?

Artur Golawski,Hubert Sytykiewicz

doi:10.1007/s10336-021-01907-8

Artur Golawski, Hubert Sytykiewicz

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-021-01907-8

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Abstract

Birds can adapt to urban areas by modifying their foraging behaviours to exploit novel urban food sources, which are far more diverse than in the country. Neophobia, the fear of novelty, can lead to missed new sources of food. Urban populations of birds usually display a lesser level of neophobia than rural populations. We examined the response of birds in urban and rural habitats to the presence of new feeders. One feeder was green (the colour of preference, according to the literature), the other one was yellow (the colour avoided); feeders of these colours are not normally used in the study area, where the colour of bird feeders is usually the natural colour of wood. We hypothesised that the yellow feeder was more likely to be avoided by rural than urban birds because of the greater neophobia exhibited by the former. During the wintering season, we carried out 22 experiments in towns and 21 in villages in east-central Poland. The interaction between habitat and feeder colour was close to zero (number of visits to a feeder, choice of first feeder). However, we did find a smaller number of visits to yellow feeders and more frequent visits to feeders in urban areas. Birds may have treated the yellow colour as aposematic, hence their avoidance of yellow feeders, whereas more visits were made to feeders in urban areas because fewer natural food resources are available there than in rural habitats.

Highlights

Urban areas are expanding rapidly worldwide because the human population is growing very fast, and many people are moving to such areas (UNDESA 2014)
The aim of this paper was to examine the colour preference of two populations of birds: one that was exposed to novel items, and the other not exposed to such items, the hypothesis being that previous exposure affects the level of neophobia
The study demonstrated that birds in both urban and rural habitats selected green feeders more often than yellow ones, and that bird visit rates were higher in the urban than in Estimate SE t

Summary

Introduction

Urban areas are expanding rapidly worldwide because the human population is growing very fast, and many people are moving to such areas (UNDESA 2014). Birds can adapt to urban areas by modifying their behavioural responses (Sol et al 2013; Audet et al 2016; Marzluff 2017), for example, to predators or competitors (Beckerman et al 2007; Hasegawa et al 2010), and their foraging tactics (Seress et al 2011; Møller et al 2015). Urban populations of some bird species have been found to exhibit less neophobia than rural populations of the same species, e.g. House Sparrow Passer domesticus and Common Myna Acridotheres tristis (Liker and Bókony 2009; Sol et al 2011). Comprehensive studies in Poland have shown a lesser degree of neophobia in assemblages of overwintering birds, such as Great Tit Parus major, in urban than in rural areas. The most probable explanation for this is that the urbanisation of birds involves the differential recruitment to urban habitats of individuals with lower levels of neophobia and earlier experiences with different food sources (Tryjanowski et al 2016). Urban environments are rich in various sources of food for birds, such as refuse dumps, leftover pet food, waste human food and bird feeders (Tryjanowski et al 2015; Ciach and Fröhlich 2017)

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