Birds Still Prefer Green Neighborhoods, Scientists Find

It comes as no surprise that birds still prefer flying in gardens and green, leafy suburban neighborhoods than the feeders found in city terraces, a study on bird behaviors found.

Times of India noted that a year-long study of over 450 blue tits and great tits found that birds are still more akin to going around suburban neighborhoods with trees, shrubs and hedges between properties. Bird feeders, despite their abundance of food on urban terraces and modern estates, are just not as appealing to the winged creatures.

University of Exeter UK researchers studied birds by attaching tags with electronic numbers on the legs of blue tits and great tits, species that usually visit garden bird feeders. They then attached scanners to 51 bird feeders with bird seed in urban homes, green suburban neighborhood and a newly built modern estate.

In their study, they found that individual birds in suburban neighborhoods were able to fly in twice as many gardens as they do in terraces. These species were also found to visit feeders in "green" neighborhoods more often.

Study author Daniel Cox shared, "The more greenery and more vegetation there is the more easily birds can fly between gardens. The research has shown that, for people living in cities, watching garden birds increases their connection to nature and makes them feel relaxed."

The study, which was published in the journal Scientific Reports, was the first of such a massive scale -- and the first in urban areas that have been using scanning technology on monitoring birds with tags as they visited feeders. However, the results are not nearly as surprising, as a previous study already gave the same conclusion.

The Seattle Times reported that in 2014, a study by John Marzluff noted in his book Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife how humans can help birds thrive in spite of the massive development in urban areas.