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Black Capped Chickadee - Anthropogenic Noise Pollution - Discussion III

Submitted by drosen on Thu, 04/19/2018 - 10:40

Our data demonstrates that mobbing call response is limited in the presence of excessive anthropogenic noise. However, there were inconsistencies such as the weather, time of day and conditions secondary to having a small sample size that may have skewed our results. For example, one trial in the quiet site had construction one morning, resulting in a reading of 56 dB and a limited response, which supports previous trends found. We expected that the trials performed during poor conditions would yield low-quality results and the data seemed followed this trend. Additionally, the noisy feeder had a higher density of individuals initially present despite studies showing that density in noisy areas should, in theory, be lower. We suspect that this may have been related to the food stores of the feeder as easy access to food may supersede the cost of temporarily inhabiting riskier foraging grounds. Finally, our small sample size per variable tested limited the conclusions that we can make regarding the percentages of response.  

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