Donald Trump wants to reduce the production paths from abroad. But did anyone ask the birds what they think?
As we all know, production is a dirty company. Not in terms of corruption, but because it usually pollutes the environment and is noisy, among other things. In general, if you ask someone if they want to live next to a steel mill or a car factory, they would politely refuse and think that you are a strange to suggest something like that.
Unfortunately, nobody asks the birds who live where there are factories. They just have to deal with some people who show up, build a huge building and suddenly pump toxic gases, dirt and other harmful particles in the neighborhood. And like one New study Shows, things get worse when a company tries to meet or beat which people call “profit expectations” in “quarterly income” (not that birds know what income is, let alone a quarter).
By combining the factory locations of American production companies with crowdsourced bird observations of the Ebird platform, the research showed that companies that increase the production activities of the quarter in production, which in turn increases pollution near their factories. The result is that bird populations fall by 2.7% within a distance to 3 km around the factory compared to companies that meet their profit estimates. For a distance of a maximum of 5 km, the decrease in the bird population is still 2% larger for companies that meet or exceed their profit expectations compared to companies that miss their profit expectations. The variety of birds also decreases by around 0.5%, but this decrease does not depend on the distance from the factory, indicating that some bird species are more vulnerable to pollution than others.
Decrease in the abundance of birds and variety in the vicinity of factories with an elevated output
Source: Thomas et al. (2024)
All the jokes aside, these are serious side effects for human production, but while I read the study, I just couldn’t help but think of the video game Angry Birds, which might be more than just a crazy game. It can be a training camp for the coming revenge of the birds that our factories have decimated.
#asked #birds