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TODAY Thursday 9 October 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Can Therapy Help the Songbirds?

Agoraphobia -- "an abnormal fear of open places," says the office dictionary -- is an inconvenient condition for anyone who has to get out and around. Here in New York, whose every street is a thronged open space, there are thousands of agoraphobes, people who stay inside their apartment except to reach out from behind the door to give twelve dollars to the Chinese bicyclist when he brings dinner.

Scientists have yet to establish a genetic predisposition for agoraphobia among humans (although it is virtually unknown among the Irish). Certain species of birds, however, seem to have it bred in the bone. Forest songbirds, it turns out, have a pronounced dislike for flying over open fields.

Perhaps you think you knew this already, but now we have evidence of the best kind. In this month's issue of Conservation Biology, the excellent journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, we learn that two Canadian scientists have conducted experiments which document and qualify the disinclination of certain forest songbirds to ever leave the woods.

Andre Desrochers and Susan Hannon studied the flight patterns of five forest songbirds (black-capped chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches, red-eyed vireos, golden-crowned kinglets and yellow-rumped warblers). They played bird calls to attract the songbirds. Sometimes the bird calls came from a place that would require the birds to fly across clearcuts and fields. And sometimes the birds the birds would choose between a direct flight across a field or a more circuitous journey around the edge of the woods.

The first two experiments showed conclusively that the bigger the unwooded gap, the less likely the songbird would fly over it. Compared to flying through the forest, a bird was four times less likely to cross a 70 meter gap and seven times less likely to cross a 100 meter gap. And almost all the birds preferred longer wooded routes to shorter open ones. Warblers were willing to fly three times further.

The lesson? The authors say that it's the importance of habitat corridors. "If we have some control over how the land is fragmented -- for example, in forestry operations -- we may be able to build in connections for birds and other species so they can move unimpeded over the landscape," says Dr. Hannon. The alternative is the 50-minute hour at $150 per. Let's see if we can bring these little fusspots around to the psychological buoyancy of the ever-coping blue jay.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

If you read Bill McKibben's op-ed in the New York Times yesterday, don't forget that you saw it here first. That's right: "My Day in Washington," which we posted Tuesday was, according to Mr. Bill himself, the inspiration for the decent but pale imitation that appeared in the self-described Newspaper of Record. We would call our lawyer if we had one.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

10/08: Girls and Puberty
10/07: Japan The Genial Host
10/06: You Don't Need A Weatherman...
10/03: Cochise County, Arizona
10/02: The Copper Queen
10/01: Pesticides in California
9/30: Climate Policy: No Pain, No Gain
9/29: Climate Policy: No Pain, Much Gain
9/26: Darwin and Bug Spray
9/25: The Cooling of Los Angeles

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