Urban noise, particularly under flight paths, negatively impacting suburban magpie population

#720Perth #ABCRadioPerth #noise #birds
When Grace Blackburn heads to the cricket field on the University of Western Australia campus, a few magpies come down from a nearby fig tree to say hello. They know him. What these Perth magpies don't know is that they are part of this PhD candidate's research into the impact of anthropogenic or man-made noise and how it affects magpie behaviour. Ms. Blackburn's birds have colorful bands on their legs, but she can recognize them visually and know their personalities. In contrast, Maggie's seems to know everything about her, including her voice. "Our lab has done some research looking at how they can understand sounds. They can recognize familiar and unfamiliar sounds," Ms Blackburn said. According to information he found with another group of magpies in Guildford, these birds also recognized the car he was driving. “Anecdotally, we find that the people of Guildford in particular can recognize our cars, which is really great,” Ms Blackburn said. "They see your car pulling up and fly right at you before you get out. They're such smart little things." Grace Blackburn with the magpies at UWA's James Oval. Sometimes the maggies hope for a small morsel of cheese that Mrs. Blackburn might have brought with her. FYI, although Ms. Blackburn gave magpies small amounts of food help with research, she needed permission from both state government and university to do so, and she does not encourage public feed birds. “There are lot people in society who feed magpies other birds on a daily basis, and this can cause lot of problems, not only in terms their health, but also their behavior, reproductive success even survival.” aforementioned. "We witnessed a baby bird being run over by a car as it crossed the road to be fed by someone." Magpies are quick to recognize individual human faces and voices. The city is disturbing Ms Blackburn, who is in the final stages of her PhD, says her research shows that man-made sounds have a significant impact on urban magpies. "When high anthropogenic noise is present, will not only forage less, but they will also be less efficient at foraging because use subsurface cues, such as the sound of insects scratching beneath the surface," he said. "Their response alarm calls has also decreased, which is really bad because if you don't react appropriately to a distress signal, unfortunately you're going get beat." Ms Blackburn had permission to feed magpies small amounts of food for her research. The research team is still not exactly sure why the noise affects the magpies; but this may be due acoustic masking, which drowns out certain sounds and makes it harder for birds to tell which sounds pay attention to. Magpies make many sounds, and some of the most important are alarm calls used to warn others and keep each other safe. "Airplane noise, which is actually anthropogenic noise I use in my experiments, overlaps the alarm calls, so it completely drowns out alarm call," Ms. Blackburn