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World Urban Birds (1 Viewer)

Fran_Bonier

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I am writing to request your assistance. I am currently compiling a list of the most common birds breeding in the largest cities of the world. I am circulating questionnaires to birders and ornithologists all over the world. If you are familiar with the birds of any of the largest cities in the world, I'd appreciate your help. Please email me directly so I can send you a list of the cities I'm surveying, and the questionnaire. The purpose of this survey is to increase our understanding of urban birds. The final dataset will be made publicly available once it is complete.

Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns. In addition, please forward this email to colleagues of yours who might be able to assist me. Thank you for your consideration.

Best regards,

Fran Bonier
[email protected]
Department of Biology
University of Washington
 
Hi Frances,

On behalf of all the Moderators and Admin Staff, I would like to wish you a warm WELCOME to BirdForum.

I hope you will be able to find enough of our members who can help you in your search, but if I may repeat Elizabeth's request, if the list is not too long, would it be possble to show it on the forum, so that you won't be inudated with request from members who ultimately cannot help you?

Thanks and Good Luck.
 
According to me, three holarctic world's most common birds are Sturnus vulgaris, Passer domesticus & Columba livia - those are the first You meet in every country (as you most often arrive on some big city). Outside towns the most probable encounter is with Corvus corax.

Here in Finland especially University Of Turku (Dept of Biology) has made urban bird research, and they published a book over the issue (in finnish & swedish) ten years ago.

To be precise we only got one city in the country (Helsinki), but here's offshoot from my town: I work on enviroprotection of Hameenlinna town (45 000 inhabitants), and this is the only town in Finland where Larus canus & Sterna hirundo have breeding colonies on the midtown rooftops. Every summer I get angry calls from ppl who are afraid of attacking gulls & terns (who protect their chicks). -On the second floor of our town library public can observe one tern colony a few metres away, behind a window.
 
Karwin said:
According to me, three holarctic world's most common birds are Sturnus vulgaris, Passer domesticus & Columba livia - those are the first You meet in every country (as you most often arrive on some big city). Outside towns the most probable encounter is with Corvus corax[/]



The Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) and the House sparrow (Passer domesticus) are seriously declining in Western Europe, well, at least in Belgium ;). So it's rather hard to say now which species is most common at present in our cities ... city pigeons most likely. In some cities Carrion crows and/or Jackdaws are well established.

.... Ravens (Corvus corax) the most probable encounter outside towns??? Huh???????? I suppose you refer to the situation in Finland here???????????????????????
 
I've had some personal communication with Fran Bonier, and wanted to share her reply to my questions about her project:

Dear Beverly,

Thanks so much for the personal welcome! Your forum has already turned up a lot of helpful contacts for my project! I've attached the questionnaire that I'm using. I'm targetting the 100 largest cities worldwide (excluding urban sprawl, to ensure high population density), using the UN's most recent data. The list is on the last page of the questionnaire. I'm also collecting data opportunistically on other cities as it is offered. I'm a grad student at UW, doing my PhD. I have a background in studying stress physiology, previously in large carnivores, now in birds. I have found that urban white-crowned sparrows in Seattle have physiologies that resemble white-crowns that breed at high elevation. This got me thinking that it may be that birds that evolved in "stressful" habitat, like mountains, desert, etc, may have an advantage at adapting to the urban environment. Only way to find out if that's true is to get a good subsampling of urban birds and test the prediction that lea!
ds naturally from my hypothesis (ie.. are urban birds more likely to be found in other extreme environments than nonurban birds). I'm doing this as a sort of "side-project" to my dissertation research, so it will be a slow process, but I hope to be done within a year. I will then publish the results of my prediction-testing, and then make the dataset available on a website, possibly affiliated with the natural history museum here at the UW (though I haven't asked them yet). I think the list will be valuable to other researchers and birders, so I want to make sure that it's widely accessible.

Let me know if you have any comments and/or questions. Also, feel free to post this message to the forum if you think others would like to read more detail about my study.

Best,

Fran Bonier
University of Washington
Department of Biology

________

Beverly, again:

I have saved a copy of her questionnaire to my computer and will happily post it if there are any requests.
 
Should be some interesting results, which she will send to all participants. I filled out questionnaires for Tokyo and Yokohama. Fran is having difficulty finding respondents in other big Asian cities-- it's the top 100 cities from an almanac, I think; anyway, the questionnaire comes with the list-- and I encourage anyone in Asia to fill one out-- it's short and easy, if you know your local birds.
 
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