DEI For Birds Could Improve Avian Conservation

A new study finds that overlooking the lives of female birds can have severe conservation consequences

© by GrrlScientist for Forbes | LinkTr.ee

Adult female red phalarope (Phalaropus fulicarius) on a snowmelt pond in the tundra. In phalaropes, the female is the more colorful (and dominant) sex. (Credit: Peter Pearsall / USFWS Alaska, common domain)

I’ve long wondered why so many ornithologists, conservation biologists, and birders ignore or overlook female birds. For example, I’ve often found a lot of challenge as well as pleasure in identifying and observing female birds as they go about their lives — lives that are different from those of the (sometimes) more showy males of the species.

This sex bias was explored by conservation biologist Joanna Wu, a PhD student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA, in collaboration with the Audubon Society. In this study (ref), Ms Wu, whose research focuses on female birds and conservation, argues that improving the identification and observation of female birds can help scientists to better conserve birds and their habitats.

“There is so much more that we can learn about birds, and ecology in general, that we miss when we only focus on males, or assume that females are ‘similar enough’ to males,” said Ms Wu, the study’s lead author. “That’s why it’s so critical that we encourage sex-specific questions in research.”

A pair of Northern cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis). How many people know that the females sing? (Credit: Dave Govoni / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

For example, Ms Wu and collaborators argue that our knowledge of birdsong is strongly biased: it is based on northern hemisphere songbirds and thus does not apply to birds living in the tropics or in the southern hemisphere, where typically, both females and males sing (ref).

“It shocked me how much of our assumptions about female birds are based on males (largely from Europe or North America) [are] simply false,” Ms Wu told me in an email.

Additionally, Ms Wu and collaborators report that other studies have found that female song is probably the ancestral state in 71% of species globally and is present in 64% of bird species with sex-specific songs (ref and ref).

Further, Wu and collaborators assert that, contrary to our now-outdated notions, both sexes participate in incubating and raising offspring in many bird species. Our sex-based biases…