Photo 63254580 © Liliia Epifanova | Dreamstime.com

2023: surely the year for harder questions about the impact of our infrastructure on biodiversity.

For example, researchers in Idaho built a fake road to test out the impact of freeway noise on migrating birds. 

“A third of the usual birds stayed away… those that stayed paid a price,” writes Ed Yong in his fabulous book Immense World on animal senses. The noises drowned out the sounds of their predators, so the birds had to spend more time looking for danger and less for food, so they put on less weight and were weaker for their migrations – which take every bit of energy the birds have.

And this didn’t include actual road effects from headlights, exhaust fumes, polluting run-off.

As Ed Yong says, more than 83% of continental USA lies within a kilometre of a road. There is nowhere else for the birds to go.

We have options to do something about this in our infrastructure, in a year we’re meant to be ‘building back better’.

Just replacing blue or white LEDS with red in, for example, parking lot lighting cuts down the impact of night light on insects. Sound-absorbing surfaces and barriers; slowing down traffic; quieter vehicles – all can immediately reduce noise pollution for animals such as owls and mice who depend on sound to catch or avoid being caught.

If 80% of humanity live under light-polluted skies and two-thirds of Europeans live in the noise equivalent of constant rain, it’s not great for people. But what Ed Yong brings out so brilliantly is how often we don’t even think about the different and miraculous sense worlds of other species, of whales and manatees and frogs and birds, and how very much worse it can be for them.

Is this the year to start taking seriously a problem we’ve only just begun to realise?

Immense World, Ed Young, 2022 – how other animals sense is truly mind-blowing.