Residential yards and neighborhoods make up a large portion of urban land use and represent an opportunity to create or improve habitat patches throughout the urban landscape mosaic. The interactions between people and nature in residential yards can be leveraged to support regional biodiversity outcomes by encouraging people to practice habitat stewardship on privately owned land. Birds are an ideal taxa to study these interactions because they are easily seen and frequently encountered in residential yards and neighborhoods. The prevalence of bird watching and supplemental feeding demonstrates people's widespread appreciation of birds. A number of studies have considered the urban bird community in terms of important ecological measurements, such as diversity, abundance, and community composition. However, there is less focus on how householders themselves perceive and evaluate different attributes of the bird community. Here, we investigate how people’s attitudes are influenced by experiences with birds found in their yards and neighborhoods. Using a quantitative social survey and bird community data co-collected across thirty-six bird-points in twelve neighborhoods located in Phoenix, Arizona, we ask: (1) How are attitudes evaluating urban bird biodiversity differentiated across a variant of experiences? (2) How do experiences and their associated meanings based on bird community attributes interact with a person’s individual characteristics to shape attitudes?
Results/Conclusions
We found that attitudes were spatially oriented along the distribution of the bird community in the Phoenix metropolitan region. Positive attitudes were relatively steadfast and were fortified in neighborhoods closer to urban parks and desert preserves compared to those farther away. Neighborhoods with positive attitudes also supported more specialist bird species that characterize the Sonoran Desert. The complexity of the bird community in terms of aesthetic traits, such as size and color, as well as the presence of easily identified or iconic species (e.g. hummingbird species) were all factors in driving positive evaluations. Overall, our study uses the construct of attitudes to establish how people evaluate attributes of the bird community in residential yards and neighborhoods. Householders differ from ecologists in their evaluations and prioritization of urban biodiversity, which holds implications for human-wildlife interactions and yard management decisions. Our study highlights the importance of considering the perspectives of people who live in cities, in conjunction with understanding the ecological patterns and process of urban ecosystems.