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

The benefits from bird feeding may also have grown as people sought comfort from con- nections with animals when lonely. People report feeling relaxed and connected to nature with more frequent bird feeding activity [8, 25]. Other papers document a pivot toward nature dur- ing the Covid-19 lockdown (e.g., Rousseau and Deschacht [37]). Thus, one possible explana- tion is that bird feeding interest surged because it is a popular nature-based past-time easily accessible to people at a time when nature could offer solace. While increases in Google search intensity for bird feeding [28] and environmental search terms [37] in response to Covid-19 lockdowns are not new, our study used the Covid-19 lock- downs as a natural experiment to assess global interest in bird feeding. Fig 2 (Panel B) indicates the countries and territories that have search interest present or absent in bird feeding during our panel period, from 1/2019 to 5/2020. Given the increases in bird feeding interest, this period offers an opportunity to identify which countries and territories have a robust interest in bird feeding, though with some important limitations. Fig 2. Global patterns in lockdowns, search intensity, and species richness. Notes: Panel A shows the timing of the first Covid-19 lockdown, with darker colors corresponding to later weeks in 2020 and white color represents no lockdown policies were implemented. The legend shows the number of weeks in 2020. Panel B shows the presence or absence of Google search interest for "bird feeding" across countries from 01/2019 to 05/2020. The white color

represents no search. A list of these countries is available in Table A3 in S1 File Column (4). Panel C shows the total number of bird species recorded by BirdLife International for each country, with darker countries having a higher number of species. The legend represents the number of bird species in a country or region. The data source for the base map is Natural Earth. Free vector and raster map data @ naturalearthdata.com. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287116.g002 PLOS ONE Covid-related surge in global wild bird feeding PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287116 August 2, 2023 7 / 15