Birds Changed Their Tune During the Pandemic
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
They classified four distinct dialects of white-crowned sparrows in urban and rural communities and studied the changes of their bird song when background noise levels lowered during the pandemic. They measured a doubling of the signal-to-noise ratio of bird songs to urban noise, which doubled the distance you can hear birds and lead to a 4-fold increase in the amount of birds that you heard during that time.
I recently learned how to distinguish between different bird types by appearance and their songs thanks to Merlin Bird ID, which is essentially a Pokédex for birds. Being able to identify different bird species has been eye-opening since I had never paid much attention to the different songs and behaviors of different birds.
Anyone can record audio and the spectrum of bird songs in the recording can be used to classify the bird species. It's super accessible to anyone who's interested in getting started.
Also, white crown sparrows are really cute.
[1] http://www.engdes.com/sigwin/company/biblio/papers/Singing%2...
It is the noise that is unnatural, not the quiet.
Ancient cities teemed with birds and bird songs, so much so that birds were often featured heavily in their creative works.
See: https://aeon.co/essays/the-ancient-world-teemed-with-birds-n...
Now, the artificial has intruded itself into the natural world. When I open the window of my urban apartment, the bird songs I hear have melodies like jackhammers and car alarms. The birds in cities now make the same sounds as the cities.
The natural world has adapted, and in doing so has become the same as the artificial.
I'm near a military base and I've never heard birds take on the bugle songs that come over loudspeakers (e.g. revelry, taps). I've also never heard birds sing the Ice Cream truck song. What makes some certain sounds so impressionable on birds?
I'd hazard a guess it's something similar to how some patterns of noise to us are music, while other patterns of noise are akin to nails screeching across blackboard.
I don't know the science behind it, but if humans find appeal in certain noises then it won't surprise me if our peers upon this planet also do.
This view that humanity is evil is the true racism.
The world is constantly in flux, there used to be animals the size of houses roaming about and then there wasn't, were they not in tune with nature or something? This is all idealogical nonsense.
Human activity didn't wipe out the animals the size of houses, which also means that the overall interdependent ecosystems back then weren't critical to human survival since there were no humans yet. Unlike today. The meteor and subsequent volcanic and tectonic activity were natural occurrences, without which humanity wouldn't be where it is today.
I'm sure that humans can 'science' their way out of many of our potential existential problems, the question I wonder about is what does that cost future generations in terms of the natural wonders that all things "The Earth" has to offer. This, of course, is only tangible to those who value such things, so the argument falls flat against a backdrop of Wall-Street style career ambition which leaves little room for much else.
My reading indicates that human activity is causing environmental damage that has the potential to cause human-society-as-we-know-it existential damage, and this is generally backed up facts about the changes we're seeing in nature - raw data, numbers, about the current state. What this means for the future is hotly debated and, like everyone says 'all models are wrong, some are useful', so, again, it depends on one's point of view as to what value is attributed to nature.
One thing is inarguable, however, which is that human survival is dependent upon a certain level of a functional natural world.
Instead, I suggest we opt for throwing away the concept of “anti-nature”, and instead acknowledge that humanity is part of nature. What has changed over history is that we are active agents in changing the totality of nature instead of being passive agents only being “affected” by it. This creates a more optimistic path towards a better future, since while it acknowledges that we have the capacity to destroy ourselves it also creates hope that we have the agency to actually “change” nature itself towards a direction we desire. Welcome to the anthropocene… (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene)
Words. People use them. They have different meanings.
If you ask me, everything on Earth including all products of humanity are natural.
This distinction between natural and artificial is primarily based off of a human superiority complex, that humanity is special and superior and masters of this planet. I feel it would benefit all of us as a species to drop that attitude ASAP because it gets in the way of objective judgment.
"Made by humans" is a useful definition of "artificial," because regardless of how we feel about human superiority, in practice we often want to distinguish between things that are made by humans, and things that aren't. If we didn't use the word "artificial" for that, we'd come up with another convenient adjective meaning the same thing (and then probably have semantic arguments over that one).
And one of their definitions for "unnatural" is "not existing in nature; artificial."
Nothing that is a product of this universe, whether directly or indirectly, is unnatural. Everything is natural, from steel skyscrapers to beaver dams to beehives to planets and stars.