Civil War Is Associated with Longer Escape Distances among Sri Lankan Birds

AbstractWar influences wildlife in a variety of ways but may influence their escape responses to approaching threats, including humans, because of its effect on human populations and behavior and landscape change. We collected 1,400 flight initiation distances (FIDs) from 157 bird species in the dry zone of Sri Lanka, where civil war raged for 26 years, ending in 2009. Accounting for factors known to influence FIDs (phylogeny, starting distance of approaches, body mass, prevailing human density, group size, and location), we found that birds have longer FIDs in the part of the dry zone that experienced civil war. Larger birds-often preferred by human hunters-showed greater increases in FID in the war zone, consistent with the idea that war was associated with greater hunting pressure and that larger birds experienced longer-lasting trauma or had more plastic escape behavior than smaller species. While the mechanisms linking the war and avian escape responses remain ambiguous, wars evidently leave legacies that extend to behavioral responses in birds.