Yes. A study of city birds in five European countries found that birds fly away sooner when a woman approaches than when a man does, letting men get about one meter closer on average before the birds take flight.
Researchers matched male and female walkers for height and clothing and had them walk directly toward birds in city parks and green spaces in Czechia, France, Germany, Poland and Spain, recording each bird’s flight initiation distance. The pattern held in all five countries and across all 37 species studied, including magpies and pigeons, based on 2,701 observations. The study, by a team including Federico Morelli of the University of Turin, Yanina Benedetti of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague and Daniel Blumstein of UCLA, appears in the British Ecological Society journal People and Nature. The scientists do not yet know why birds react this way. Possible cues include scent such as pheromones, body shape or walking style, but these ideas remain untested. The team calls the results preliminary and says they matter for field research, because many behavior studies assume a human observer has no effect on the animals.
Source: ScienceDaily, Birds are more afraid of women than men (British Ecological Society, October 2026)
Image: Magpie (Pica pica), Rimrose Valley Country Park, Mike Pennington, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.