Birds experience road rage due to traffic sounds: study
It’s making these angry birds choose fight over flight.
Humans aren’t the only ones who are prone to road rage. Scientists have found that certain songbirds in the Galapagos behave more aggressively around traffic noise because it drowns out their warning calls, sometimes resulting in fights with rivals, per a study published in the journal Animal Behavior.
“Birds use song during territorial defense as an aggressive signal,” Dr. Caglar Akcay, Senior Lecturer in Behavioral Ecology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in the UK said, according to Phys.org. “However, if external noise such as traffic interferes with the signaling, effectively blocking this communication channel, increasing physical aggression would be an appropriate response.”
To deduce the effect of noise pollution on birds, researchers played avian songs over a loudspeaker at 38 locations populated by male yellow warblers — a songbird that’s prevalent throughout the archipelago — on the islands of Floreana and Santa Cruz.
Twenty of the sites were located around 164 feet from the nearest road while the remaining 18 were located 328 feet away.
Scientists then played two different soundtracks; One featured the song of a rival male yellow warbler while another included this tune plus traffic sounds, the Guardian reported.
They found that the males who lived near roads would act far more belligerently when exposed to the traffic-inflected soundtrack than those who lived further away.
Scientists observed the perturbed birds approaching and flying around the speakers in apparent search of said interloper.
Akçay said that while this fly-by was likely an effort to make themselves heard, some males remained silent as they approached, indicating that the time for “talk” had passed.
“If there was an actual bird instead of a speaker, that would mean … a challenge, essentially, and that could result in a physical fight,” he said.
“Our results show that the change in aggressive responses in yellow warblers occurred mainly near roads,” the scientist concluded. “Birds occupying roadside territories on both islands, and therefore having regular experience of traffic noise, may have learned to increase physical aggression when the territorial intrusion was accompanied by traffic noise.”
This heightened aggression was observed even on Floreana, where only 10 vehicles are present, suggesting that even minimal noise ruffled feathers.
Scientists noted that on the more populous island of Santa Cruz meanwhile, the avians also trilled for longer in the presence of traffic sounds while the opposite was true on Floreana.
This phenomenon suggested that either birds that could better cope with traffic noise settled near roads or that “birds adapt as a result of living near traffic,” per the scientist.
Interestingly warblers in both roadside and offroad habitats ramped up the minimum frequency of their songs — possibly so they could be heard over the car-caphony.
Akçay said that these findings demonstrate the importance of species adaptability in conservation efforts and “developing strategies to mitigate the effects of noise pollution on wildlife.”
“It also highlights the significant impact of human activities on wildlife behavior, even in relatively remote locations such as the Galápagos Islands,” he said.
