An international team of researchers has uncovered an unexpected quirk in the behavior of urban birds: the birds take flight sooner when a woman approaches them than when a man does. The reasons for the difference remain unknown, the website infohub.kz reports.
The large-scale experiment was carried out in parks and public gardens across five European countries — Germany, Spain, Poland, France and the Czech Republic. The participants, matched for height and style of dress, walked straight toward the birds. The researchers recorded the flight-initiation distance — how close a person managed to get before the bird took fright and flew off.
It turned out that men on average were able to approach the birds almost a meter closer than women. The pattern held across all 2,701 observations and involved 37 species, ranging from wary magpies to tits, sparrows, thrushes and pigeons accustomed to people.
The authors suggest that birds may be able to tell a person's sex from cues invisible to us. Among the hypotheses are chemical signals such as pheromones, differences in gait or body proportions. The researchers now plan to test each of these factors separately to better understand how wild animals assess threats in the urban environment.