Does the noise of traffic annoyed you? Do you hate sleeping in a room overlooking a road crossed by machines at every hour of day and night? You are not the only ones: also The parula of mangrovesone of the most popular birds of the Galápagos, has problems with the busy roads, so much so that it is changing its behavior becoming increasingly aggressive. This is told by a study by the University of Vienna, published on Animal Behaviour.
More people, more machines. The birds we are talking about are of the species Seophaga Petechiaand in particular of the subspecies halo: The mangrovie’s words are widespread throughout the American continent, but the habitat of this subspecies is limited to the Galápagos archipelago, off the lard of Ecuador. Once wild and uncontaminated islands, today they are experiencing a population boom – also due to that of tourism -, with a 6% growth on an annual basis.
This involves an increase in the machines circulating for the islands, and to discover the impact of this constant background noise on the starts, the Austrian team has first traffic recorded in 38 different stations of the archipelagoThen he made the birds heard the recordings and observed the reactions.
“I oooodio the machines!”. Like many birds, the mangrovepie starts react to what that perceive like a danger first singingin an attempt to keep the intruder at a distance, and then approaching with threatening and fluttering in the face. Faced with the recordings of the singing of other birds, mixed with the noise of traffic, the words reacted with different degrees of aggression.
Sing that passes to you. These behaviors have been discovered, they are linked to how close these birds live on a road. Those whose nest is less than 50 meters from the nearest road have reacted with much more aggression than those who live over 100 meters from the cement. Furthermore, The starts accustomed to traffic noise sing longer and higher volumeprobably in an attempt to dominate cars. In short, these birds hate the traffic as we hate it, and theirs way of adapting consists in glowing.
