Every time you walk through a square and the pigeons take flight, something strange is happening right before your eyes — although you probably never noticed it. A study published in the journal People and Nature reveals that urban birds allow men to get, on average, one meter closer before taking flight. A whole meter of difference. And no one knows why.
The experiment was designed very carefully to avoid errors: 4 men and 4 women took part, all expert ornithologists, with similar clothing and height. A total of 2.701 observations were collected on 37 species — pigeons, magpies, blackbirds, crows, starlings, finches — in five countries: Spain, Germany, France, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The researchers even avoided collecting data during their menstrual period to eliminate any possible olfactory bias. The result was always the same.
Ecologist Yanina Benedetti, from the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague and co-author of the study, confirmed the pattern. But neither she nor her colleagues have a clear explanation. Do birds associate women with something threatening? Do they detect hormonal, movement, or sound differences? For now, science can only say that the phenomenon exists. The next time you go to a square, watch. Maybe you will notice it too. 🕊️