Songbird song april seattle how to#

The survey results suggest that Seattleites do indeed value the finches highly. And house finches - common, visible and attractive, with their red hoods and sweet song - are a good proxy for other songbirds. Marzluff says he and his colleagues wanted to give respondents a “significant scenario” to respond to. Might it not make more sense to ask them how much they’d pay to support songbirds in general?

Some people who love birds might not be eager to see more house finches. It can drive out native birds such as purple finches. The house finch is a cheeky immigrant from the Southwest (its scientific name is Carpodacus mexicanus) that thrives, like pigeons and house sparrows, in human-altered landscapes. The researchers asked a representative sample of residents in a range of neighborhoods whether they like songbirds, how much they spend each year feeding them, and how much they would pay to either boost or reduce the populations of certain species: house finches and American crows in Seattle and, in Berlin, their German counterparts, greenfinches (which are pretty and mellifluous like American house finches), hooded crows (a nattier, less obstreperous cousin) and European magpies, another corvid species that many people see as thieves and pests. It combines two metrics to reach that goal: How much people spend feeding songbirds, and how much they'd spend to get more of them (using finches and crows as a proxy). Marzluff told me this study is unusual in its attempt to value common domestic birds. Other studies have tried to put a value on endangered avian species and the sort of rare, charismatic birds that draw bird watchers and drive ecotourism. The result, a paper entitled “How Much is that Birdie in my Backyard? A Cross-Continental Economic Valuation of Native Urban Songbirds,” was recently published in Urban Ecology. So he set out, together with colleagues here and in Germany, to determine how much people in Seattle and Berlin, value their songbirds.

Songbird song april seattle how to#

cummings: “I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.”īut wildlife scientist John Marzluff, the Birdman of the University of Washington, is known for undertaking unusual bird research he once donned caveman and Dick Cheney masks and harassed campus crows to prove that these super-birdbrains can recognize and remember human faces. How much are songbirds worth? The question recalls that 'Priceless' punchline from the Mastercard commercials and a poem by e.e.