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Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

Not just insects. Where I used to live even birds had left. A decade of stronger regulations and cleaning the closer by river made animals come back. And the river started to look less like a sewer and more like a river. The pollution that kills insects is not good for humans either.

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Not necessarily a co-incidence.

“Small birds are always vulnerable to predation from larger species. ... One reason that the larger birds do well in cities is that they are more likely to benefit from human-created foods (petfood, garbage, foodscraps and carrion) than small birds, which mostly eat insects.”

https://www.birdsinbackyards.net/birds/featured/Small-insect...

On a side note, I noticed after the pandemic began, the birds began starving because they started eating out of our dog's bowls of food.

A lot of birds are getting way closer to our windows than they used to be (lived in the same place for 40 years). These aren't angry bird (npi), usually they keep their distance with humans, but now they come very close very often.. I cannot not interpret it as a sign of risk taking facing higher needs.

In the last month we've had 2 small birds (that don't eat peanuts we leave out for crows) come into our kitchen (wife leaves it open when she cooks). In 20 years here, that never happened before.

We've seen the same phenomenon in multiple directions. Crows were usually near habitations, and we've seen a lot more deeper in the forest, and smaller birds that were hiding in the forest have been more adventurous and come to our balcony.

I don't know how good/bad of a thing it is, but surely there seems to be something going on.

For what it's worth, people also seem to have rediscovered the forest, and I hope will get more emotionally involved in its maintenance and preservation.

It might be something else, like temperature or wind making them move. Or maybe it's there food sources drying up. I can't say. I should ask knowledgeable people.

A few evenings ago I went out on the deck and there was a huge owl just sitting on the railing. It looked at me like, “what are you going to do about it?”

We feed crows in our area peanuts and when neighbors complained of crap on their cars we stopped for a bit, but they were really aggressive in asking for peanuts. Sometimes there are 10 of them on the wires near the street. They follow my wife home from a main roost a few blocks away--they seem to recognize her in her car. It's unclear if there's a connection to the article.

crows are super clever, when I drive brisbane to sydney they'll be in the middle of the road eating kangaroos and other dead animals, they dont fly away they just hop to the right of the line so I dont squish them at 100 miles an hour, watch me go by then go back to what they are doing - they actually know which side of the road I'll go past and that they will be safe.

If you're doing 160kph in QLD you must have no fear of the highway patrol, haha!

The crows are on his side. The highway patrol knows better than to mess with someone who’s with the crows.

Songbird populations everywhere are hurting.

I wonder how much noise levels are playing a role in it. Habitat loss is an obvious contributor but it seems like noise levels would hurt songbirds efforts to find a mate.

Trump futzing around with the clean air and water act has newly ruined rivers in North Carolina and our ground water with PFAS :(

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