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The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey documented a family of peregrine falcons on the Bayonne Bridge. Port Authority

What city birds around the world have in common

This story was originally published by The Revelator.

Why do some bird species seem to flourish alongside humans, eating our crumbs and nesting in our backyards, while others prefer to live as far as possible from dense human populations?

Monte Neate-Clegg began to ponder the question while attending the American Ornithological Society’s 2019 conference in Anchorage, Alaska. “I was staying at an AirBnB and two of the birds I wanted to see in Anchorage, white-winged crossbills and boreal chickadees, were just in the yard,” said Neate-Clegg, at the time a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah. Although new and beautiful to him, the species are common in Anchorage and so omnipresent they’re typically ignored by residents.

“I started thinking, what is it that makes these ‘trash birds’ here, and not elsewhere?”

Neate-Clegg sounds sheepish about using the pejorative-sounding term “trash bird,” but it’s a phrase commonly used by birdwatchers to refer to species ubiquitous to a given location they cease to become interesting and can become irritating. Classic examples include pigeons in city centers and snack-stealing gulls on beaches.

One man’s trash bird is another’s research query. Neate-Clegg wondered if specific traits make certain species more able to thrive in cities around the world. After joining ornithologist Morgan Tingley at his lab at UCLA as a postdoctoral researcher in 2021, he proposed a lab-wide project in an attempt to answer the question.

The research drew on data providing clues which may eventually reveal a roadmap making our cities more bird friendly.