I was scrolling a twitter thread that posted this article last night and some of the suggestions were insightful, others not so much

The Good:

• In ancestral evolutionary environments women would’ve been more likely than men to be catching small game like birds or gathering eggs from bird’s nests and the birds have evolved this fear of women over men lol ya’ll some baddies.
• Women are more likely to be wearing makeup with SPF and that makes them look odd in the UV spectrum. But I really questions whether that is widespread enough to explain this.
• Women are more likely to be wearing fragrances or perfumes that birds are very sensitive too. But it’s not like men don’t wear scented deodorants, wear clothes with scented laundry detergent, and body sprays or cologne.

The Bad - Explanations that are goofy or weak but not outright misogynist:

• Women are more likely to try to pet birds (?) or are more reactive to the presence of birds, and birds are matching this energy. I admittedly need to get out more but I’ve seen neither of these trends.
• Birds are afraid women will pin them to a hat as a fashion accessory or gather their plumage as crafting materials. Might be on to something here.
• Girls are cats and boys are dogs.

The Ugly - outright sexist or upstream of it:

• Man hunter, man stealthy stalker, sneak up on bird, woman clumsy, scare bird! I know I ranked the anthropological explanation high above, I feel like this is trying to do that but with a very simplified and woman=weak framework.
• Women don’t move around as much and their gait is clumsy and disconcerting to birds??? Feels like you’d have to watch nothing be manosphere flavored evopsych video essays to buy this.
• Female chaos dragon -type explanations that attribute it to birds sensing women’s bad energy, kinda just sexism with a veneer of psychology. Boring, stale.

Honorable mention for most fun is that outdoor workers who are more likely to be men eat outside and get crumbs everywhere and have befriended the birds though food, while women who are neat eaters have failed to produce enough crumbs to unlock this perk.

Birds hate birds

i am generally absolutely covered in crumbs and interesting garbage, plus i am so hairy i look like typical mutualism partner mammal for those birds that hang out with/on to get at bugs.

everyone else is entirely normal by comparison, but the outlier results for me completely skewed the average for all dudes making the results look gendered.

Here’s the actual study. And here’s a critical point:

In each city, two observers—one woman and one man—collected data at all sites (in total, four women and four men, all expert ornithologists, were involved in the study).

Only four people of each gender is not a statistically relevant sample size. Whatever the birds reacted to, might have been because of random (not gender-related) differences between those two groups of four people each. And they weren’t all present at all sites, some might have done multiple sites and some only one, narrowing the effective sample size even further.

They were instructed to look directly at the birds. Maybe one or two of the four women just happened to look the birds directly in their eyes in a more intense way and skewed the data slightly. Or maybe one or two of the four men interrupted eye contact slightly more often or in more cases. Or any other thing. Not because of their gender, just because they’re human and all humans are different. Four people are not enough to average out these differences and get at gender traits, if those do exist.

Also, the difference in Flight-Initiation-Distance (FID) was not all that big (~1 meter), barely visible in this picture and note the wide spread of the data:

As you can see in the data, the FID was mostly rounded to the nearest meter. The rounding error is about as big as the supposedly observed effect. Maybe one group tended to round down if in doubt and one group tended to round up in edge cases.

Edit: There’s more: only in the female group are there clearly visible secondary peaks at five, fifteen and twenty meters (and even at 25 m, 30 m and 35 m). This indicates, that participants tended to round not just to the nearest meter, but to the nearest five meters, casting doubt on all the measurements.

I think this means we should bring back bird brained as an insult, but only for incel dudes

The majority of urban birds are songbirds and pigeons, which is to say the dumbest things with feathers except for maybe turkeys, so this tracks

The next step is to compare their reaction to a population of trans women pre- and post-transition to see if it changes according to make-up use, longer hair, use of different fragrances etc

I am the bird whisperer