They only look as though they might go for your eyes at any moment.
Fans of Alfred Hitchcock may be surprised to find that being surrounded by birds can actually improve your mental health.
Given our global fascination with all things avian, researchers from Kings College London set out to investigate whether encountering birds in everyday life had a positive effect on mental wellbeing, and if so, how long this effect could last.
Participants were asked to report, via a smartphone app, whether they could see or hear birds, and afterwards what their mental health was like, at three random times a day across a two-week period. A total of 1300 individuals worldwide completed around 27,000 of these “ecological momentary assessments” between April 2018 and October last year.
The results of these assessments, published in a study in Scientific Reports, showed that regularly experiencing birdlife was associated with significant improvements in participants’ mental health. These improvements lasted up to eight hours, and occurred in people diagnosed with depression as well as those without a mental health condition.
Researchers also found that these benefits were not explained by co-occurring environmental factors, such as being around trees, plants or waterways.
The authors indicated the value of their findings in potentially shaping mental health policy, as well as supporting conservation efforts to maintain habitats that foster birdlife.
“Visits to habitats with a high degree of birdlife could become part of social prescribing schemes, playing a role in preventing mental health difficulties and complementing more traditional interventions,” they wrote.
Such visits might have the opposite effect on one TMR colleague, who upon encountering a magpie or noisy miner on a footpath would promptly collapse on the ground out of fear.
If you encounter anything emu-sing, hoot it at penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
