Birdsong and your wellbeing – what’s the deal?

Our lifestyles are becoming increasingly disconnected from nature due to the ever-growing urbanisation and pervasive biodiversity declines. Our engagement with nature is reducing, which is known as ‘extinction of experience’, and this lessens nature’s contributions to our physical and psychological health (Gaston & Soga 2020). Sound is an important component of nature engagement – I’m sure any bird lover would agree! However, our soundscapes are becoming quieter and less diverse (Morrison et al. 2021), mirroring the collapse of bird populations. Birdsong is becoming a less important component of our soundscapes, whilst the sounds of cars begin to dominate. This is not only concerning for bird-lovers who may be missing loud dawn choruses, but it is also a public health concern as listening to birdsong improves our wellbeing (Fisher et al. 2021) and enjoyment of spending time outside (Hedblom et al. 2014).

Figure 1. Eurasian goldfinch Carduelis carduelis perching on trellis at an English vineyard © Natalia Zielonka.

More birds and better sounding vineyards

Viticulture is UK’s fastest growing agricultural industry, and it is closely linked to tourism through vineyard tours and tasting events. Soundscapes are an important component of the tourism experience, and so, understanding how soundscape conservation could support vineyard tourism is important. This is why our study took place across 21 English vineyards, where we monitored bird populations and recorded soundscapes using AudioMoth devices to understand the relationships between bird diversity and vineyard soundscapes.

We characterised vineyard soundscapes by acoustic indices that described sound complexity and volume, and we related these to the diversity of the bird populations. As expected, vineyards with more bird species had louder and more diverse soundscapes, whilst those with low bird species richness had quieter and more monotonous soundscapes.

Figure 2. adapted from Zielonka et al. (2024), showing significant relationships between acoustic indices that characterise the diversity and volume of English soundscapes (x-axis) and scores that capture visitors’ experience of vineyard tours, with higher scores indicating more positive responses (y-axis).

To further understand the effect that soundscape characteristics have on visitors’ experience of tours, we manipulated soundscapes with the use of hidden speakers, which played a constructed bird chorus of five additional species. This experimental enhancement made soundscapes louder and more diverse than the ambient soundscapes, whilst controlling for all other elements that may affect our experience of nature (e.g. tree cover) and of the tours (e.g. demeanour of the guide). Remarkably we found that visitors who experienced our enhanced soundscapes, scored more highly for sound enjoyment, soundscape connectedness and tour satisfaction. These visitors found the vineyard sounds more appealing and showed stronger agreement with statements such as: ‘‘I felt relaxed during and immediately after this vineyard tour’’ and ‘I was engrossed by the sounds I heard along the vineyard tour’. This showcases that natural sounds are an important part of our experience of nature and are noticed, even if subconsciously. Crucially, our experimental design singled out the direct contribution of sounds to visitors’ experience and demonstrated the importance of considering soundscapes in initiatives aiming to improve nature’s contributions to our wellbeing.

Figure 3. Adapted from Zielonka et al. (2024) comparing scores that capture visitors’ experience of vineyard tours, with higher scores indicating more positive responses (y-axis) between those who experienced ambient vineyard soundscapes (Off) and experimentally enhanced soundscapes when a bird chorus playback was played through hidden speakers (On, x-axis).

How we experience and appreciate the natural world varies on an individual level and may be dependent on our existing attitudes towards nature. The same holds true for soundscapes as we found that those visitors who were more willing to purchase organic and fair-trade foods (what we termed ‘pro-environmental behaviour score’), also scored higher for sound enjoyment and tour satisfaction. These individuals likely had higher levels of care and awareness of nature, which may have affected how much they connected to nature (Barbaro & Pickett, 2016), and the vineyard soundscapes. This also highlights that individuals with lower levels of pre-existing interest in nature may benefit less from spending time in nature and from soundscapes, even if they are loud and diverse.

Conserving natural soundscapes – a win for birds, tourism and our wellbeing?

Amidst the continual biodiversity losses and as access to greenspaces becomes more limited, it is more important than ever to create new and accessible opportunities for nature engagement. We demonstrate how conservation of bird populations could enhance our experiences of nature and benefit our wellbeing. Given the importance of the tourism industry within viticulture, creating vibrant soundscapes is of high relevance to vineyard managers. At one extreme, this could be achieved artificially through hidden speakers, but we strongly advice against this approach as it would require significant investment in technology, maintenance and would be without any further conservation benefits. Instead, the ambition should be to invest in conservation through habitat provision and reduced agro-chemical use (Zielonka et al. 2024). As tourism loyalty has been shown to increase with positive experiences (Jiang & Yan 2022), we hypothesise that investing in the creation of complex and diverse soundscapes could lead to visitors’ recommending the experience to others, or indeed returning themselves, and be a win-win-win for biodiversity conservation, visitors’ wellbeing and business prosperity.