Urban lighting turns birds on
Urban lighting can cause male birds to be ready to mate weeks ahead of the mating season, according to Science News magazine.
But whether the birds started taking a lot of cold showers during this period is not made clear. Research by the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany found that: “Male blackbirds monitored in a lab under simulated city lighting started secreting increased levels of testosterone and growing their sexual organs up to a month earlier than birds kept in country-style darkness.”
In case you’re confused, male birds don’t grow new sex organs, their existing parts just get larger. But more worrying is that further exposure to urban light was found to shut down the birds’ reproductive period early.
Disrupting our little feathered friends’ breeding patterns sounds like mankind tampering with nature again. But as most urban-bird populations are a nuisance, the research tentatively suggests that lighting could be used to limit populations by shortening the mating season.
Sadly, this may be a non-starter; in the real world birds are exposed to various light levels due to a thing called ‘flying around’.
