The bright lights (and noise) of the big city haven’t just made the days of songbirds longer, they have thrown a wrench in the birds’ circadian rhythms, researchers studying European blackbirds have found. The study, which is in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that city birds wake up 30 minutes earlier than their forest counterparts and stay up nine minutes later after dark.
When brought into the lab, the city birds still started their days earlier, but their sleep and rest cycles were off.
Read the journal paper, here.
Read coverage of the study from the BBC, here.
And read the Atlantic Cities blog post, here.
Photo: European black bird by Malene Thyssen, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Malene GNU Free Documentation License, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5