Birds Thrived Where Humans Feared To Tread During The Pandemic, Scientists Say

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/22/ [login to see] /birds-thrived-in-urban-settings-during-pandemic-lockdowns
"Anthropause" is a word scientists have coined to describe the scaling back of human activity since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. While it's probably safe to say most people have found it uncomfortably restrictive, a new study published Wednesday suggests the pandemic has allowed many bird species to stretch their wings.

As people remained indoors, stopped commuting to work or hopping on passenger jets, the birds increasingly flew into urban areas they had previously shunned, according to findings published in Science Advances.

Michael Schrimpf, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manitoba's Natural Resources Institute, and his colleagues used information gathered on eBird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's online database of detailed bird sightings reported by citizen scientists. They compared records of sightings of 82 bird species, a total of 4.3 million individual birds, in Canada and the United States from March through May 2020 — when many cities were in full coronavirus lockdown — with the same period for 2017 through 2019.

"Everything from birds like hawks and eagles all the way down to small songbirds and even hummingbirds," Schrimpf tells NPR.