Wednesday 2 May 2012

Carry on Tweeting




I'm not refering to the 140 character message service. I have no experience of this sort of tweet and being a late adopter in all things, will probably have lost the use of my digits by the time I decide to try it.  I'm writing about our feathered friends. I was concerned about the affects of the air-force display team on the bird life of Bodrum. The roar of the jet engines so close overhead made my ears ring and left a shudder in the air as they passed over so,  I was worried that the birds might fall out of the sky in fright. In fact the opposite was true. We watched the show from our roof, about level with the top of the fir and pepper trees which are home to a diverse colony of sparrows, pigeons and blackbirds.  As the jets roared overhead, these birds carried on their daily life totally ignoring the monsters in the sky. They didn't even stop singing.  Research shows that male birds adapt to noise polution by singing at a higher pitch than they would normally do. Female birds are more attracted to deep voices so it's thought that breeding patterns may well be altered by too much noise. On Saturday the boys must have been tweeting like castrati and as it's mating season, more than one male bird must have had his chances ruined.

6 comments:

  1. that's certainly not good news for the birds or humans! I sometimes wonder if it would have been better all around if we'd never progressed out of a cave! certainly better for our wildlife...if we'd kept our more "wild" attributes!

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    1. The research on birdsong and noise pollution is ongoing. I found the research to date very interesting.

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  2. eeeek-eeeek-eeeeeeeekkkk!

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    1. As you live in the wilds, I thinks that is a deep bass eeeeek, Alan.

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  3. Birds are fascinating aren't they? I'm aware of their tweeting in the background and find it quite comforting. I recall experiencing the eclipse in Goreme a few years ago, when it became dark in the middle of the day and there was absolute silence, no bird noise at all. It was very unsettling and quite a relief when the sun reappeared and their chorus started up again.

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    1. I was in Bodrum that day and not only the birds but the insects shut up too.

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