Covid-related surge in global wild bird feeding: Implications for biodiversity and human-nature interaction

richness may also have greater ecological importance within the bird community. This could amplify both the positive and negatives of bird feeding for this community. Second, it is possi- ble that people are sensitive to diversity, despite not being able to quantify species richness very well in surveys [47]. This sensitivity is consistent with an experiment showing that people felt better when randomly exposed to recorded bird songs along a trail and, if exposed twice, were able to attribute the increase in their well-being to greater bird presence [48]. Cox and Gaston [7] found that bird feeders preferred a greater variety of species visiting the bird feeder over a greater abundance of the same species. There may be greater well-being benefits for people in places with more diverse habitats and greater habitat complexity, which could result in more investment in bird feeding in areas with greater biodiversity [4]. V. Conclusion and contribution Based on the historical development of bird feeding practices, the market size for bird seed, and the literature regarding how bird feeding influences birds, one might expect feeding to be concentrated across the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia [1]. Our results, however, assert that bird feeding is occurring at a global scale; large increases in Google search intensity after lockdowns occurred in 115 countries that had sufficient search volumes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to measure people’s interest in bird feeding

at a global scale. The extensive practice of supplementary bird feeding documented in this study has broad implications for avian communities and their migratory patterns. While Fig 3. Comparing species richness across Google search interest. Notes: These are broken out by categories used by BirdLife International [41] to describe a bird’s relationship to a country, for example, whether they are a permanent resident or only visit when breeding. The line in the center of the boxplot is the median, and the ends of the box are the lower and upper quartiles. Outliers have been excluded when plotting the boxplot whiskers. The difference in bird species richness between countries with and without search interests is statistically significant for each group (see Table 1). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287116.g003 PLOS ONE Covid-related surge in global wild bird feeding PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287116 August 2, 2023 10 / 15