ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2023
Urban birds become less fearful following COVID-19 reopenings.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 13 citations in OpenAlex.
- Human action shapes the beaks of backyard birds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Rapid morphological change in an urban bird due to COVID-19 restrictions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Human vocalizations impact skink risk assessment depending on human exposure.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Feather macrostructure is marginally correlated with temperature range but not urbanization across California.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Human recreational activity does not influence open cup avian nest survival in urban green spaces.Urban ecosystems · 2025Article
- Urban birds' tolerance towards humans was largely unaffected by COVID-19 shutdown-induced variation in human presence.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Urban birds become less fearful following COVID-19 reopenings.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many people around the world stayed home, drastically altering human activity in cities. This exceptional moment provided researchers the opportunity to test how urban animals respond to human disturbance, in some cases testing fundamental questions on the mechanistic impact of urban behaviours on animal behaviour. However, at the end of this 'anthropause', human activity returned to cities. How might each of these strong shifts affect wildlife in the short and long term? We focused on fear response, a trait essential to tolerating urban life. We measured flight initiation distance-at both individual and population levels-for an urban bird before, during and after the anthropause to examine if birds experienced longer-term changes after a year and a half of lowered human presence. Dark-eyed juncos did not change fear levels during the anthropause, but they became drastically less fearful afterwards. These surprising and counterintuitive findings, made possible by following the behaviour of individuals over time, has led to a novel understanding that fear response can be driven by plasticity, yet not habituation-like processes. The pandemic-caused changes in human activity have shown that there is great complexity in how humans modify a behavioural trait fundamental to urban tolerance in animals.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.