Data for: Phenotypic plasticity in the anthropause: Does reduced human activity impact novel nesting behaviour in an urban bird?

The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily transformed urban ecosystems by restricting public human activity to only the most essential societal functions, even as other landscape-level factors such as the built environment remained unchanged. In so doing, it provided a unique opportunity to experimentally answer questions about the role of human disturbance in driving behavioural adaptation in urban wildlife. We compared nesting data collected on an urban dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis) population nesting on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus during the 2021 nesting season, when the campus restrictions were in effect, to a similar dataset collected in 2019, before the pandemic, in order to examine (1) whether urban dark-eyed juncos on the UCLA campus altered their use of novel off-ground and artificial nesting sites in response to reduced human activity, and (2) if reduced human activity impacted nesting success. We found that after a &gt;80% reduction in human activity, junco nesting success during the COVID-19 pandemic modestly increased compared to pre-pandemic levels. However, nest-site selection remained unchanged. Our findings suggest that the landscape of the built environment or urban predators, rather than disturbance by human activity, drives novel nest-site selection in urban birds.<br>