Airports are incredibly noisy. In Berlin, at the Tegel airport, one plane took off every two minutes between 06:00 and 23:00 for 75 years. During aircraft take-off, noise levels near the airport are incredibly high, so high that birds stop singing altogether.
In 2016, colleagues showed that birds near the airport started singing on average 10 minutes earlier than in a quiet forest, probably to gain time of uninterrupted singing before the air traffic started.
In November 2019, the Tegel airport was definitively closed. An airport that closes is a very rare event, and we used the opportunity to look at the long term effects of noise on birds.
We found that half of the bird species living by the airport still started singing earlier than in the quiet forest, although noise pollution had stopped more than six months before. This shows that noise pollution has long term consequences on wild animals, although the mechanisms are not yet well understood.
Read the complete study here.
Picture: one of the automatic recorders in the forest near the airport. To measure at what time birds started singings, we deployed 14 recorders for three days and recorded 127 hours of bird activity.
