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Animal populations are currently under pressure from multiple factors that include human land use and climate change. They may compensate for such effects by reducing, either by habituation or by natural selection, the distance at which they flee from humans (i.e., flight initiation distance), and this adaptation may improve their population trends. We analyzed population trends of common breeding birds in relation to flight initiation distance and geographical location (latitude, longitude, and marginality of the breeding distribution) across European countries from Finland in the north to Spain in the south while also considering other potential predictors of trends like farmland habitat, migration, body size, and brain size. We found evidence of farmland, migratory, and smaller-sized species showing stronger population declines. In contrast, there was no significant effect of relative brain size on population trends …