Traffic Noise, Birds, and the Urban Environment
Traffic Noise, Birds, and the Urban Environment
Transcript
Kirsten Parris: Well lots of animals communicate with teach other using sound, and birds sing and call to each other to attract mates, defend territories. Or perhaps warn danger from approaching predators. In cities, there’s a lot of noise made by people, particularly traffic noise. I’m here for a study. I’ve come all the way from Australia to look at how birds are affected by traffic noise and whether they’re changing their songs in noisy parts like this one.
In other parts of the world, people have found that birds are changing their songs; changing the pitch of their songs, making them higher, squeakier above the background noise. This helps them hear each other over greater distances, so I’m interested to see if birds in Phoenix do the same thing.
I’ve come here to collaborate with people from Arizona State University, the CAP LTER, and also Phoenix is a great place to study traffic noise because there are so many cars and there’s so much traffic. So an interesting application of this work, or an extension of this work would be to see how birds can breed successfully even in noisy conditions. If birds are changing their songs, they’re probably not able to change them enough to completely get over the impact of the traffic noise.
So they would still have some trouble hearing each other. I’m interested to see whether this translates into an affect on breeding success; whether they can attract their mates, maintain a peer bond, and successfully produce young in these noisy habitats.
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The above transcript provided by Landmark Associates.