Face mask-wear did not affect large-scale patterns in escape and alertness of urban and rural birds during the COVID-19 pandemic

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F68081766%3A_____%2F21%3A00545279" target="_blank" >RIV/68081766:_____/21:00545279 - isvavai.cz</a>

Alternative codes found

RIV/00216208:11310/21:10433602 RIV/60460709:41330/21:85864 RIV/60460709:41330/22:85746

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972103744X?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" >https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972103744X?via%3Dihub</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.148672" target="_blank" >10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.148672</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Face mask-wear did not affect large-scale patterns in escape and alertness of urban and rural birds during the COVID-19 pandemic

Original language description

Actions taken against the COVID-19 pandemic have dramatically affected many aspects of human activity, giving us a unique opportunity to study how wildlife responds to the human-induced rapid environmental changes. The wearing of face masks, widely adopted to prevent pathogen transmission, represents a novel element in many parts of the world where wearing a face mask was rare before the COVID-19 outbreak. During September 2020-March 2021, we conducted large-scale multi-species field experiments to evaluate whether face maskuse in public places elicits a behavioural response in birds by comparing their escape and alert responses when approached by a researcher with or without a face mask in four European countries (Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, and Poland) and Israel. We also tested whether these patterns differed between urban and rural sites. We employed Bayesian generalized linear mixed models (with phylogeny and site as random factors) controlling for a suite of covariates and found no association between the face mask-wear and flight initiation distance, alert distance, and fly-away distance, respectively, neither in urban nor in rural birds. However, we found that all three distances were strongly and consistently associated with habitat type and starting distance, with birds showing earlier escape and alert behaviour and longer distances fled when approached in rural than in urban habitats and from longer initial distances. Our results indicate that wearing face masks did not trigger observable changes in antipredator behaviour across the Western Palearctic birds, and our data did not support the role of habituation in explaining this pattern.

Czech name

—

Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

10618 - Ecology

Project

—

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2021

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Science of the Total Environment

ISSN

0048-9697

e-ISSN

1879-1026

Volume of the periodical

793

Issue of the periodical within the volume

November

Country of publishing house

NL - THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS

Number of pages

8

Pages from-to

148672

UT code for WoS article

000691604500011

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85115412357