Is Coronavirus For The Birds? How The COVID-19 Shutdown Affected This Bird’s Song

The dramatic reduction in automobile traffic noise in San Francisco during the COVID-19 lockdown has allowed a common songbird to sing softer, more elaborate songs that are more appealing to the ladies

The coronavirus pandemic response has been an unmitigated disaster for people living in the United States, but how has it affected wild birds? A recent study of wild sparrows living in San Francisco found that they responded to the reduction in traffic noise by singing softer and more elaborate songs, and their resulting vocal virtuosity made them more appealing to females.

“When the city was loud, they were singing really loudly”, said lead author of the study, behavioral ecologist and ornithologist Elizabeth Derryberry, an Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Like people trying to converse in a crowded pub, the sparrows were shouting to be heard over the background noise of the big city, and this reduced the quality of their songs.

White-crowned sparrows (WCSP), Zonotrichia leucophrys, are small handsome songbirds clad in soft grey with bold black and white stripes on their heads. They are a well-studied model organism that have contributed to literally tens of thousands of studies on learning, communication and signal evolution.

“I’ve been working on WCSP in San Francisco for some time, and was working on how noise affects communication before the lockdown”, Professor Derryberry said in email. Professor Derryberry is an expert in integrating behavioral and evolutionary ecology to better understand animal communication, and her primary model system is the white-crowned sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys.

Sparrows living in the San Francisco area have contended with urban noise pollution for decades, so they learned to shout to be heard over the racket. But when the coronavirus shelter-in-place mandate was enacted in mid-March 2020, nearly all automobile traffic stopped, so formerly bustling motorways abruptly fell nearly silent.

“Even then, I wasn’t immediately thinking about how the lockdown might be affecting behavior.”

“It was only through seeing photos on social media of low levels of traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge that it hit me just how much less traffic (and therefore how much less noise) there likely was on these birds’ territories.”

“Oh my God, it’s empty”
Professor Derryberry has studied urban and rural white-crowned sparrows and their songs in the San Francisco area for more than two decades, so the coronavirus shutdown provided a unique opportunity to examine the effects of this new-found silence on these birds’ songs.

Professor Derryberry began by quantifying the variation in the soundscape across urban (San Francisco and Contra Costa Counties) and rural (Marin County) areas, focusing on the breeding territories of white-crowned sparrows, which are common in these areas (Figure 1).

Professor Derryberry and her collaborators found that the background noise on the sparrows’ breeding territories during the months of April and May had significantly dropped during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place mandate: the number of vehicles on the Golden Gate Bridge suddenly dropped to 1954 levels, and overall noise pollution levels decreased by 50% (Figure 2).

How did this abrupt reduction in noise pollution affect the sparrows’ songs?

The shelter-in-place order prevented Professor Derryberry from traveling to San Francisco herself, but a co-author of this study, behavioral ecologist Jennifer Phillips, a postdoctoral researcher at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, recorded the background noise as well as the birdsongs in San Francisco and the surrounding areas.

Professor Derryberry and her collaborators then compared the birdsongs recorded in the 1970s to Dr Phillips’ recordings made at the same sites between April and May 2020, which is during breeding season.

They found that as background rumble of vehicles fell off, the sparrows sang 30% more quietly, on average, than in earlier years and their songs could be heard twice as far away as in earlier years, when the sparrows were shouting their heads off.

Additionally, the sparrows also sang more elaborate songs with expanded vocal ranges that enhanced their overall performance. As expected, spectrographic analysis revealed that urban sparrow songs changed more than rural sparrow songs, effectively reversing the effects of half a century of urban noise pollution.

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