Songbird Behavior and Conservation in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene has seen the rapid decline of bird populations. Indeed, a recent analysis of songbird abundance in North America indicates that populations are one-quarter smaller (~3 billion fewer birds) than a half-century ago (Rosenberg et al. 2019). This shocking decline should be a calling to all ornithologists to turn their attention to conservation and management. A good starting point, Songbird Behavior and Conservation in the Anthropocene, aims to provide a behavior-focused management framework for beginners and practitioners alike. We found it exciting to read a book that explicitly focuses on the role that behavior plays in informing conservation and management strategies. An understanding of behavior is important for examinations of how animals solve problems in their environment, and there are certainly a lot of problems for songbirds to solve in the Anthropocene. From rising temperatures to multi-modal sensory pollution to habitat fragmentation and degradation, songbirds are navigating a rapidly changing environment. Understanding behavioral responses to these unprecedented challenges is key to informing management strategies. And yet, behavioral biologists often lag behind other fields in addressing how animals solve these challenges (Buchholz et al. 2019). This book does an excellent job providing an overview of what is known (and needs to be known) about songbird behavior in the context of the conservation challenges of the Anthropocene. The editor of the book, Darren S. Proppe, is himself a behavioral ecologist who not only studies the behavioral responses of birds to noise pollution, but also considers the resulting impact of noise and the transportation network on bird populations (Kociolek et al. 2011; Proppe et al. 2013). He is well-positioned to gather what is known about the role of behavior in the function and ecology of songbirds living in the Anthropocene. Proppe has selected an expert team of authors to generate each chapter. For instance, Todd Freeberg, along with Kimberley Mathot and Sue Ann Zollinger, provide an excellent primer on animal personality and its role in driving microevolution. They then continue to make a compelling argument for why animal personality is an important topic of study for conservation. They describe evidence for personality-related settlement patterns of songbirds in disturbed environments, such as the tendency for more aggressive Great Tits (Parus major) to settle more disturbed areas (Sprau and Dingemanse 2017) and biased dispersal of highly aggressive Western Bluebirds (Sialia mexicana) on the invasion front of a landscape altered by logging and then by human provisioning of nest boxes (Duckworth and Badyaev