**5. Conclusions**

This study has contributed fundamental research towards understanding the different categories of stress experienced by avian patients requiring clinical treatment. By organising stressors as preliminary, primary or secondary, this allowed for a clearer understanding of the chain reaction between environmental stress and avian wildlife. Furthermore, this study demonstrated that humanand urbanisation-related stressors were the most common stressors which lead to the hospitalisation and death of birds over a four-year period. In the future, it would be advantageous to monitor tertiary stress in order to allow for an evaluation of birds' wellbeing in the long term. Similarly, these categories of stress could be used to identify species-specific trends and identify which species cope more effectively with urbanisation and which species are more at risk of dying out due to human activity.
