Chernobyl-based birds avoid radioactive nests
‘Birds in Chernobyl choose to nest in sites with lower levels of background radioactivity, researchers discover, but how they can tell remains a mystery.
Anders Møller at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and Tim Mousseau at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, US, erected more than 200 nest boxes in the Red Forest, about 3 kilometres away from the nuclear reactor that exploded in 1986.
Using these artificial nests, they studied at the nesting habits of two species of birds – the great tit Parus major and the pied flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca – between 2002 and 2003.’
