Urban Selection: Behavioral change resulting from cities

The urban environment as altered how we interact with each other. We merely need to walk a couple of blocks to migrate from home to work to grocery shopping and etc. Our lives and behavior have been altered. I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about how urban life compares with its suburban counterpart. Our conversation shifted drastically to talking about song birds.

My friend was talking about some article she had read about song birds in urban settings compared with forests. The article was published recently but was referencing a research article published by the Animal Behavior journal. Erwin Nemeth and Henrick Brumm from The Institution of Ornithology in Germany wrote that article summarizing their results that Blackbirds sing higher-pitched songs in cities.

I thought that it was really interesting because everyone talks about how humans have transformed the land and are destroying the habitat for many species. Here, one species has adapted to the concrete jungle.

Nemeth and Brumm measured, using electrical recording equipment, the song frequencies of many birds in the forest and cities. They reported that songs (which were any type of sound used to communicate with other birds) sung in the city had significantly higher frequencies than ones sung in the forest. They say that this might be due to two factors. One is that the birds are trying to overcome the noises produced by the cars and other mechanical equipment used in the city. The birds use these songs to communicate, so they need to differentiate their sounds to attain better “contrast”. The second factor that plays into that is the buildings. Sounds can be heard at great lengths in the forest, but those same sounds have a hard time escaping the dampening effect of concrete.

For those reasons, scientists believe that “urban selection” has permanently altered the behavior of these species.

WWOOOOOOOOOOWW!!!!