Bird flight initiation distances in relation to distance from human settlements in a Tanzanian floodplain habitat
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Date
2014-09-26
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer
Abstract
Human activity affects wildlife in many ways,
but there have been few studies of how wildlife behav-
ioural responses to human disturbance vary with distance
from centres of human activity. Theory suggests that fear
responses may be either higher in areas with high distur-
bance (disturbance avoidance) or lower in such areas (e.g.
due to habituation). We used flight initiation distance (FID)
to study how fear responses of 16 bird species varied with
distance from villages (range 0.1–11.6 km) within the
Ramsar site of Kilombero Valley, Tanzania. A linear
model indicated that FID was not related to distance from
villages, but varied between habitats. However, a piecewise
linear model (linear response up to 2 km, flat response
[2 km from villages) provided a better fit and suggested
that there may be a small decrease in FID close to human
settlements, in particular for the Common Bulbul (Pycn-
onotus barbatus) and a few other species, although the majority of species still showed little change in FID with
distance from human settlements. Our results suggest that a
few species may respond to human disturbance with a
decreased FID, whereas the majority of species showed
little variation in FID in relation to distance from human
settlements, and may therefore be negatively affected by
increasing frequency of human disturbance.
Description
Article
Keywords
Birds, Fear response, Flight initiation distance, Habituation, Human disturbance