Stress of city wildlife

                                                Stress in city wildlife

A new study has just shown that animals are also susceptible to the at pace of city life. Birds have been shown to rise earlier and to encounter higher levels of stress. Several times when I have travelled during the night I have encountered pigeons hanging around all the fast food places. It appears the birds are awake longer than they would be in a rural setting. Birds in the city wake on average half an hour earlier than their forest cousins.

The implications of this are profound! Do we expect that they will get the same diseases as city dwellers get?

The evidence for this is now somewhat patchy. The dawn chorus starts earlier as birds wake up from the night and proceed to defend their territories. The day starts a lot earlier and they are reputed to have greater success in finding mates. In many ways we see the birds as a mirror image of ourselves. They keep the same times and in some ways like the pigeons I saw they stay up later and rise earlier.

This begs of course a massive question as when looking at wildlife in the city somewhat reduced in number of species it runs to how they deal with the stress. What would definitely e interesting would be to know if this causes the same sort of problems as we see in humans with negative medical effects.

As they share our city world with its bright lights and fast pace does it follow that they are affected by the same sort of problems. The original survey was done on blackbirds. They are quite a common species in the towns but there were calls for studies to be made on urban foxes as well. London has its fair share of scavengers with the main urban wildlife being foxes, a fairly ubiquitous part of our wildlife, crows and magpies, starlings and of course the pigeon.

How they are affected extends to what they are eating as well.  Many of the species that successfully make their homes in the city are scavengers. They scavenge all that humans eat and in this case it means dealing with takeaways. Most London areas are filled with takeaway shops bearing things like “Chicken and chips” and kebabs. In many cases the people who eat these are either drunk or spoiled and the remains are fast thrown on the ground to be picked up by the scavengers that lurk. Many times an old carton of chicken and chips is pecked on by the starlings, crows, pigeons or foxes who suddenly materialize on any morsel that has been dropped.

These birds materialize and peck at the discarded food. Most of the time they only search for that as do the flocks of crows that appear in the neighbouring areas looking for the trash left by humans. Scavenging makes food finding easy

Rubbish bins suffer the same fate as crows and foxes try in their turn to tale what is left. The question of course is if they eat such bad food, don they suffer the consequences as humans do and end up suffering various conditions such as clogging of the arteries and various circulatory disorders or does the fact that they lead active lives protect then from this?

This is a question we will find hard to k now as there is no knowledge of how much calcification and hardening of the arteries there is. Many urban birds partake in some way in the feast ! Yet nobody can say quite how it will affect them.