How urban and rural birds respond to the colour of bird feeders?
| Autor: | Hubert Sytykiewicz, Artur Goławski |
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| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Ornithology. 162:1193-1198 |
| ISSN: | 2193-7206 2193-7192 |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s10336-021-01907-8 |
| Popis: | 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. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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