The key to success in urban environments may be to be sufficiently plastic so as to tolerate direct disturbance by humans. By studying escape behavior we can ask how wildlife respond to threats such as humans, and by tracking individuals, we can study plasticity. We compared flight-initiation distance and distance fled from approaching humans across urban and non-urban populations of individually-marked dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) in southern California. We found that both populations primarily use information about proximity of an approaching threat to determine escape decisions. Attenuated flight initiation distance and distance fled indicates population-level habituation in urban juncos, yet urban juncos did not consistently habituate or sensitize when repeatedly tested. What explains this between-individual variability, whether there is an urban-rural gradient in within-population variation, and whether or not this individual variability has fitness consequences needs further study.