Johannesburg - As South Africa went into a hard lock down at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, many of its citizens, for the first time, started noticing what was happening in their gardens.
They were not alone across the world; people under quarantine began appreciating the birds that visited their gardens.
Some of those people even for the first time took to feeding birds.
Just how widespread this was, was unknown. That is until a group of researchers from the US and Australia were able to work out the extent of this global trend in interest in feeding birds by looking at people’s Google searches.
The results of their research was published this week in the journal, PLOS ONE. South Africa was found to be one of the countries that saw an up tick in interest.
Previous research had shown that there had been an increase in bird identification and bird feeding in the US and in some European countries during Covid-19.
But little was known about other countries and if citizens there had taken to this relatively easy to do, inexpensive and accessible hobby.
The authors examined the weekly frequency of search terms like, “bird feeder”, “bird food” and “bird bath,” on Google for individual countries from January 1, 2019 to May 31, 2020.
They found that there was a significant increase in the frequency of bird related searches across 115 countries, in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
What they also discovered was that countries that lacked those bird related searches generally had fewer bird species.
Countries like Kenya and Pakistan were shown to have taken interest in wild birds over the Covid-19 lock down.
Mark Anderson, the CEO of Birdlife South Africa, said that he and his organisation had noticed more people showing interest in birds and bird watching during the lockdown period.
“People were seeing things for the first time because they were just spending more time birding,” says Anderson, who was not a part of the study. “We were getting emails and phone calls from people about birds they had seen in their gardens. Most of these weren’t common birds”
This has added to a recent rapid growth in bird watching in South Africa. “We have been blown away by how bird watching has grown. I think it is because you are no longer seen as being nerdy to be interested in birds, it has become a cool thing to do.”
The authors hope that further research will provide more data about the global extent of bird feeding and capture more information from previously understudied countries.
“Up until now, most evidence on bird feeding has been limited to the US, Europe, Australia and India, however we suspected bird feeding might be more widespread. This is important to know because bird feeding affects bird health and migration patterns”, the authors said in a statement.