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Urbanization has led to changes in the sexual habits of birds
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
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Female tits living near roads and human settlements have to change their sexual habits: usually they prefer low-voiced males, but industrial noise forces them to deal with those who sing high, but can be heard.
The impact of human civilization on wildlife is expressed not only in chemical pollution or the disappearance of habitats that are familiar to animals. Researchers from Leiden University (Netherlands) decided to check how noise pollution affects the behavior of birds.
We are accustomed to the noise of the city, industrial production, highways, and the impact of noise "dirt" on the environment is not very obvious to us. However, industrial and urban sounds, which are grouped mainly in the low-frequency zone, can interfere with the communication of animals and birds, thus affecting their behavior and ecology. In their previous studies, ornithologists from the Netherlands showed that road noise makes male great tits (Parus major) literally raise their voices - sing at higher frequencies. In the new work, scientists find out how much such an increase in tone affects the behavior of birds.
Ornithologists recorded the songs of 30 males, which they perform at dawn during the spring mating season. An analysis of vocal exercises led to the conclusion that the males perform the lowest-frequency songs directly for females, who are about to lay eggs. After the chicks hatched, the researchers checked which of the males received their own chicks in their nests and which were fooled. It turned out that the higher the male's mating song, the greater the likelihood that the female would run away from him to meet a new suitor, and the chicks in the nest would be the latter's offspring.
Thus, female tits (like many women?) are fans of males with a sexy baritone. In the third version of the experiment, the authors offered females hiding in their nests to listen to recordings of male voices. The females preferred low songs, but if low-frequency noise was superimposed on the recording, they had no choice but to respond to high voices. The scientists presented the results of their observations in the journal PNAS.
Thus, male tits living near humans have to make a difficult choice: if they sing sexy and low, they may simply not be heard, and if they sing high, there is a chance that someone else will be preferred. Females have to somehow change their behavior, choosing not the one they want, but the one who can be heard.
At the same time, the tits, as the researchers write, are lucky: they can vary their songs in pitch. How those who were not endowed by nature with such a flexible voice behave in this case, how fatally noise pollution affects their ecology - this is yet to be studied. But it can be assumed that the fate of such species, which also happen to be near a city or highway, is very unenviable.