The secret lives of backyard birds
Gila woodpeckers, great horned owls and mourning doves are some of the many birds you’ll find in the Phoenix metro area. From common bird-watching subjects to the focus of research that can help birds and people, our feathered friends are even more interesting than they first appear. Graphic by Sophia Franz/ASU
Birding, or bird-watching, is no longer just for retirees.
People of all ages are into birds these days. In the U.S., more than 1 in 3 Americans over the age of 16 are birders.
At least 95% of them bird in their own neighborhoods. Because birds are everywhere, getting started is easy. Just watch and listen wherever you are.
And it’s not just an activity for the birds. Listening to birds is good for our well-being. It also encourages people to spend time in nature, which benefits our mental health and brain function.
At Arizona State University, researchers enjoy watching and studying birds to help them — and us. Birds can help us plan better cities, understand chronic diseases like diabetes and much more.
A bird’s eye view of Phoenix
Birds and people depend on the same urban spaces. As Phoenix grows and changes, it creates both challenges and opportunities for people. But what does it mean for birds?
Heather Bateman, a professor and associate dean for graduate studies and research in the ASU College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, studies long-term trends of how wildlife interacts with built and natural environments.
She is part of the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program, known as CAP LTER, which is led by the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at ASU and funded by the National Science Foundation. Through CAP LTER, hundreds of researchers — many of them students — have studied the Phoenix metro area’s ecology over nearly 30 years. The project’s bird census has monitored Phoenix’s birds since 2000.
“The awesome part about working with long-term ecological data is that we can see these trends in, for example, bird diversity and richness in the city over time,” says Bateman, who is also a senior Global Futures scientist in the Global Futures Lab. “It allows us to ask really cool questions about how bird diversity varies across the city.”
CAP LTER research recently looked at 15 years of data to see how increased development and rising temperatures have affected birds. These changes are linked to fewer birds and fewer species in the city. Adding more plants can bring in more birds and improve human well-being at the same time.
CAP LTER’s Phoenix Area Social Survey, led by Kelli Larson, a professor in ASU's School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, also links the variety and number of birds in certain neighborhoods to what people think about them.
From bird census and social survey data, researchers found that 43% of Phoenix-area households put out food or water for birds. Hummingbirds were more abundant where residents provided nectar feeders, suggesting many people intentionally attract them to their yards.
“I think a lot of people crave that connection to nature, and birds are one window, one way to really experience nature in our backyards,” Bateman says.
Larson adds, “By analyzing the bird community data with survey responses from residents, we’ve found that more diverse birds in local communities are associated with more positive perceptions of them. In related research underway, we have found that providing birds with food, water and plants is associated with greater personal satisfaction and well-being.”
ASU Ornithology Collection
Get a whole new perspective on birds at the ASU Ornithology Collection. See local and exotic birds closer than you can in the wild through an interactive tour. Contact Jay Taylor at [email protected] to set up a visit and learn about the history of the collection.
You can also contribute to the collection. Email the location and a photo of recently deceased birds in good condition to Taylor to get started.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s both!
Birding has led to many opportunities for Jay Taylor. The associate professor in ASU's School of Life Sciences puts his extensive bird knowledge to use as the instructor of an ornithology course. He also serves as curator of the ASU Ornithology Collection. Bird specimens in this collection are used both for research and teaching.
Taylor's interest in birds was a gateway to the fields of ecology and evolution, and led to a research career focused on a less well-known creature: Taylor now studies mites — tiny relatives of spiders that play an important role in Sonoran Desert soil health.
Taylor says there’s an interesting species of mite in Central and South America that eats flower nectar. But nectar doesn’t last long, and the tiny mites, which are about the size of a poppy seed, can’t travel far on their own.
“Moving from one flower to another flower, even on the same plant, is just an impossible task for a mite,” Taylor says.
So the mites have found a method of transportation using hummingbirds — hence their nickname, hummingbird flower mites.
“They’ll either hitchhike on the bill itself or they’ll actually enter the nares of the bird — the nostrils,” he says. “And then when the bird goes to another flower, the mites will dismount. Basically the hummingbirds are like airplanes for this mite.”
But these hummingbird airliners sometimes carry more than one type of passenger; Taylor says there’s another mite species that hitches rides on hummingbirds so it can eat the flower mites.
Do birds get cancer?
ASU researcher Carlo Maley has studied why birds are less likely to get cancer than mammals.
Flying with diabetes
Even the most familiar birds are more remarkable than they appear. Mourning doves, for example, are among the most common birds in the U.S., but they’re anything but ordinary beneath the surface.
“I like mourning doves a lot,” says Karen Sweazea, an associate professor in ASU's College of Health Solutions and Center for Evolution and Medicine. "They’re so cute and very sweet. They're super cool endurance athletes that are basically flying with diabetes without any problem.”
Sweazea, also a researcher in the ASU Biodesign Center for Health Through Microbiomes, studies diabetes and cardiovascular disease in humans. She does this by looking at how other animals get or don’t get these conditions. Birds in particular have many of the same risk factors as people — they have high blood sugar and insulin resistance — yet many species avoid diabetes or clogged arteries, unlike humans and other mammals. In fact, for mourning doves, the diabetes medication metformin increases their blood sugar instead of lowering it.
“I really want to know how birds don't develop complications of diabetes even though they have incredibly high blood sugar as a normal part of their physiology,” Sweazea says. “That could translate into ways to help people with diabetes.”
She says many birds, including mourning doves, use fat for their primary energy source instead of carbohydrates, which fuel people’s bodies. Too many greasy french fries make us unhealthy. But a high-fat diet — from insects and the occasional discarded fry — efficiently fuels mourning doves for migration.
But not all birds can eat all the junk food they want. Sweazea notes that while mourning doves can stay healthy while feasting on bread alone for a month, ducks can develop malnutrition and deformities from eating too much bread and popcorn. That means there is something special about mourning doves worth paying attention to.
Avoiding chronic disease isn’t birds’ only health superpower. For example, birds live much longer than mammals of similar size. A mouse may live only one to three years. A parakeet, which weighs about the same, can live 15 to 20 years.
“Birds age remarkably well. It’s very hard to tell a young bird from an old bird,” Sweazea says. “They have a very prolonged healthy period compared to us, and they go against all of these different theories of aging, which is so cool.”
Next time you see or hear a bird, take a moment to marvel at these amazing animals and the many benefits they bring to science — and our daily lives.
Karen Sweazea’s research is funded in part by the American Physiological Society. Sweazea's work is also part of the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program, which is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number DEB-2224662.
Bird better with tips from ASU researchers
Whether you want to enjoy the birds in your backyard, hope to compete in the World Series of Birding or fall somewhere in between, birding is a rewarding hobby with something for everyone.
If you want to go beyond simply noticing the birds around you, ASU researchers and birders Heather Bateman and Jay Taylor have some tips for you.
1. Get started with a tech tool
- ASU’s Bird Finder tool can help you get to know Southwest birds by sight and sound.
- Merlin Bird ID, a free app developed by Cornell University, can help identify birds by sound on the go, like the music discovery app Shazam does with songs.
- xeno-canto is an online library containing over a million recordings of animal sounds, including more than 10,500 bird species.
- eBird, another resource from Cornell, lets you see what other birders have spotted in your area and share your own observations.
2. Be a good listener
Taylor encourages beginning birders to pay attention to the sounds that birds make. Each species has its own distinctive set of songs and calls.
“As you learn the vocalizations typical of each species, you will detect many more birds than you would otherwise,” he says.
However, identifying bird songs can be tricky. The northern mockingbird, for example, can mimic up to 200 distinct birdsongs and sounds. You can audibly spot a mockingbird by listening for its distinct pattern. Mockingbirds repeat a song three to six times before switching to a new one in their repertoire.
3. Pay attention to beaks
Birds have to eat a lot, and their beak size and shape can tell you about their preferred snacks. Seed eaters often have thick conical beaks. Nectar drinkers have long beaks for long, slurping tongues. And insect eaters have nimble tweezers for snatching up a snack. Beaks can also help birders tell similar-looking species apart.
4. Level up with behaviors
As you watch more closely, you may start to see interesting behaviors among your feathered friends. Bateman encourages Arizonans to watch for Abert's towhee, a bird found almost exclusively in our state. She says to look for towhee couples greeting each other with loud squeals and excited jumps.
5. Contribute to bird science
Birders are an important source of data used by scientists, conservationists and policymakers to make new discoveries about bird biology and to conserve bird populations in a rapidly changing world.
Through websites such as eBird, iNaturalist and xeno-canto, birders contribute millions of bird observations, photographs and recordings every year. This data has helped researchers better understand how bird distributions are shifting in response to climate and habitat changes, and even infectious disease.
Birders at all levels can participate in citizen science. Taylor says a great way to begin is by keeping a yard list. This helps document the state of bird populations in your neighborhood. All you need to do is spend a few minutes per day counting and identifying the birds in your yard and then upload the data to eBird.
6. Have fun!
As long as you give wild birds their space, there’s no wrong way to bird. Watch the birds that catch your attention and enjoy making new discoveries at your own pace.
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