Silas Fischer, a PhD candidate at the University of Toledo, has been studying Gray Vireos since they were an undergraduate. Gray Vireos, songbirds of the arid woodlands of the Southwest, are very, well, gray, often described in field guides with phrases like “one of North America’s most nondescript birds.”
“I can’t think those [labels] would inspire people to want to go out and see that bird or study it,” says Fischer, who’s noticed how birders and scientists alike seem more drawn to “flashy, sexy warblers.”
Fischer wondered whether these aesthetic biases influenced what birds ornithologists chose to study. And after analyzing the subjects of more than 27,000 ornithology papers published over five and a half decades, they and their colleagues have determined that the answer is yes—the higher a bird ranks for characteristics humans find beautiful, the more likely it is to be the subject of scientific research.
Science strives for objectivity. In an ideal world, ornithologists would choose bird species to study based on how little we know about them, how scientifically interesting they are, or how in need they are of conservation. But like all humans, scientists are subject to conscious and unconscious biases.
To see how this plays out in the scientific literature, Fischer and their colleagues narrowed their focus to 293 perching birds and their closest relatives that breed in North America, tallying how many scientific publications focused on each species between 1965 and 2020. They ranked the aesthetic appeal of the males of each species by scoring them on how colorful and contrasting their plumage is and whether they show any iridescence, a crest, or other striking features. (According to Fischer, the team focused on males because of previously documented biases toward male birds in ornithology research, reasoning it was the males that would primarily drive researchers’ interest.) They also considered how large each species’ range is and how many universities it encompasses.
The results were unmistakable. The birds that scored in the top 10 percent for visual appeal had been studied three times as much as those that scored in the bottom 10 percent. Unsurprisingly, birds were also the subject of more research if they had large ranges that included multiple universities, making them easily accessible for students in need of research projects. Surprisingly, species were studied less often if they had eponymous names (that is, names that reference specific people, such as Cooper’s Hawk), a trend Fischer is still pondering the potential drivers of.
Fischer’s study adds to growing calls to devote more research attention to overlooked birds.
“The things that we choose to study ultimately shape our broad knowledge base about the world,” Fischer says. “Scientific interest and output are part of this broader overarching cycle, this complex feedback loop that drives public awareness of a species and potentially the conservation status designations and decisions that we make.”
Fischer’s study adds to growing calls to devote more research attention to overlooked birds. In January, a group of women and nonbinary ornithologists and birders who’ve dubbed themselves the Galbatross Project published a paper calling for more research on female birds, which also suffer from scientific biases and are often left out of data collection.
“This is a great study. I was really excited to see it,” says Joanna Wu, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles and the lead author of the January paper. Preferences for more attractive birds “are subconscious and not malicious,” she says, “but at the same time, the consequences of these biases are real.”
A handful of species, including the Philadelphia Vireo, Black-chinned Sparrow, and Crissal Thrasher, were the focus of zero papers included in the analysis. Overall, according to Fischer, drab birds in the Southwest—especially those far from large concentrations of universities—seem to be particularly understudied.
Of course, there are many reasons why an ornithologist might choose to study one bird species over another. “Some of the results reported in this paper are no doubt due to implicit bias, as the researchers indicate,” commented the University of Northern Colorado’s Lauryn Benedict, who has been involved in efforts to gather better data on female birdsong, via email. “But some others might be due to thoughtful selection of study organisms that are best suited to important research questions.”
Studying species with very large ranges at multiple locations across that range, she points out, lets scientists answer intriguing questions about within-species variation, even if it means those species end up overrepresented in the scientific literature. But, Benedict added, “Papers like this are important because they remind the research community of where we are putting our effort, and they help us to think about what we might be missing.”
As for Fischer, they say they’re “still salty” about their beloved Gray Vireos being dismissed as the most boring-looking bird on the continent. “I just want to keep studying dull, drab birds,” Fischer says. “Somebody has to.”
