Do you remember noticing more birdsong during the Covid lockdown? You weren’t imagining it.
Scientists who were studying the impacts of traffic noise on the songs of urban white-crowned sparrows in San Francisco found that their songs – normally louder, higher-pitched and less complex – reverted to the quieter, lower and more complex songs of their rural cousins, and could be heard more than twice as far.
This is just one story from Traffication by my former colleague, scientist Paul Donald. His book brings together all the scientific research on what’s known as road ecology, a subject that hasn’t received a lot of attention in the UK.
