Are birds more afraid in urban parks or cemeteries? A Latin American study contrasts with results from Europe...,

MORELLI, F; LEVEAU, LM; MIKULA, P

SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2022

0048-9697

v>The escape behaviour, measured as flflight initiation distance (FID; the distance at which individuals take flflight whenapproached by a potential predator, usually a human in the study systems), is a measure widely used to study fearfulness and risk-taking in animals. Previous studies have shown signifificant differences in the escape behaviour of birdsinhabiting cemeteries and urban parks in European cities, where birds seem to be shyer in the latter. We collected aregional dataset of the FID of birds inhabiting cemeteries and parks across Latin America in peri-urban, suburbanand urban parks and cemeteries. FIDs were recorded for eighty-one bird species. Mean species-specifific FIDs rangedfrom 1.9 to 19.7 m for species with at least two observations (fififty-seven species). Using Bayesian regression modellingand controlling for the phylogenetic relatedness of the FID among bird species and city and country, we found that, incontrast to a recent publication from Europe, birds escape earlier in cemeteries than parks in the studied LatinAmerican cities. FIDs were also signifificantly shorter in urban areas than in peri-urban areas and in areas with higherhuman density. Our results indicate that some idiosyncratic patterns in animal fearfulness towards humans mayemerge among different geographic regions, highlighting diffificulties with scaling up and application of regionalfifindings to other ecosystems and world regions. Such differences could be associated with intrinsic differencesbetween the pool of bird species from temperate European and mostly tropical Latin American cities, characterizedby different evolutionary histories, but also with differences in the historical process of urbanization.