Posted by Sam Heggie-Gracie @SamHegGra

It’s not easy being a city slicker; vainly calling over car noise, isolated from my friends in a small patch of forest, narrowly avoiding a cat (I’m allergic; also, see Sam’s post). And that’s just me. Urban birds must navigate these conditions too, and for them, it can mean the difference between life and death. By measuring a number of these pressures, I hope to elucidate which abiotic and biotic drivers mould the avian assemblages of Auckland city for my MSc.

Urban ecology studies are a relatively new area of research, as people around the world are increasingly drawn out of a bucolic lifestyle and into the jobs and excitement that cities can provide. The sprawling city of Auckland spans out from the concrete jungle of the CBD, through a gradient of increasingly green urban and suburban areas and onto rural outskirts. Our bird friends are found throughout, so I will be assessing the difference in bird abundances and composition across this environmental gradient. Additionally, I will be looking into what drives bird composition within urban habitat fragments. By assessing housing density, fragment size, noise pollution and a myriad of other urban characteristics, I hope to determine which of these are most important for providing a suitable home for our birds.

Tui Art by Cally Whitham https://www.behance.net/gallery/native-endemic/5061863

Previously, the words ‘all bird observations will occur between 5 and 9 am’, had filled me with much apprehension, but after overcoming the dread of waking at such an ungodly hour, I have become most earnestly committed to the birds of Auckland city and relish getting up to listen to the beatific morning chorus. Hoot hoot!

Sam Heggie-Gracie is an MSc student in the Centre for Biodiversity & Biosecurity, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland. He is investigating the drivers of bird composition in cities. He is supervised by Margaret Stanley and Cheryl Krull (AUT).