A review of flight-initiation distances and their application to managing disturbance to Australian birds

Disturbance—the response of birds to a stimulus such as the presence of a person—is considered a conservation threat for some Australian birds. The distance at which a bird flees from perceived danger is defined as the flight-initiation distance (FID), and could be used to designate separation distances between birds and stimuli that might cause disturbance. We review the known FIDs for Australian birds, and report FIDs for 250 species. Most...