Welcome to a special birding edition of the Science Times newsletter, which will land in your inbox every Friday through September.
Ice storms in Texas, smoke from Canadian wildfires billowing over much of North America, 31 consecutive days of 110-degree heat in Phoenix: Those have been just some of the swings in the weather this year. How are the birds faring through it all? It's too early to draw any confident conclusions from the data, scientists say. Maybe there were fewer sightings of birds in Phoenix during the heat wave, or maybe fewer people ventured outside to bird watch. Based on past data, however, researchers know that hot and cold spells have a negative effect on birds, especially newly born hatchlings. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology runs a program called NestWatch that enables volunteers to report what is going on in a nest: how many eggs, how many of them hatch, how many of the hatchlings eventually fly away. In a paper that has been submitted to the journal Nature Communications, Conor Taff of the Cornell Lab and J. Ryan Shipley of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research examined more than 300,000 breeding records for 24 North American species of birds from NestWatch and two similar programs, Project NestWatch in Canada and Project MartinWatch, which tracks young purple martins. For each of the 300,000 nests in North America, Dr. Taff and Dr. Shipley looked up the weather records at that location, noting the hottest and coldest three-day stretches during the nesting period. "When there's a particularly cold or a particularly hot period, does it impact your ability to successfully fledge nestlings?" Dr. Taff said. The answer, in many cases, was yes. For 16 of the 24 species, a cold snap significantly reduced the number of hatchlings that made it out of the nest, by about 10 or 20 percent, Dr. Taff said. When the weather is cold, insects are slow to emerge, leaving many birds with less food to bring back to the nest. "If it hits right at that really vulnerable stage, they don't do very well," Dr. Taff said. The effect of heat waves was less pronounced, with 11 of the 24 species seeing a reduction in successful fledglings. With temperatures warming globally, many birds are nesting earlier in the spring when temperatures can fluctuate more wildly from warm to cold. Future research could tie in data from eBird to more directly measure fledgling success rates and compare them with the size of local bird populations. "You can potentially match that up with whether there was a cold snap or heat wave during the breeding season and whether that's affecting kind of the population level abundance," Dr. Taff said. The paper also shows that there is much to learn about how the changing climate will affect birds. It's not even necessarily the extreme events like hurricanes or heat waves; more modest temperature shifts could also be deadly. "They're obviously not good if they happen at a time that the birds are vulnerable," Dr. Taff said.
Tell us: Birding and climate change. Has birding affected how you view the climate crisis? Let us know by emailing birds@nytimes.com, and we might feature your comment in a future newsletter. Participant profile: A lifetime of birding and he's only 24
Patrick Maurice credits his mother for his birding passion. One of his earliest memories is of her lifting him up to a scope at age 5 to see a yellow-billed loon near his hometown, Atlanta. His brother also came along on such trips, but only Mr. Maurice became interested enough to become a birder. Now 24, he is trying to make birding a career, as a freelance tour guide around the country. "Birding is not exactly a popular hobby for a young person," Mr. Maurice said. "In high school, I kept it in the closet. I had friends, but I didn't tell them I was a birder." He had stopped hiding his passion by the time he went to the University of Georgia, where he pursued a major in wildlife sciences and began thinking about birding for a living. He didn't want to be a scientist, but he loved showing people birds. His mother encouraged him to find a well-paying job and leave birding for the weekend, as she had. "But I told her that saying, about doing what you love and it won't feel like work," Mr. Maurice said. He has now worked as a junior instructor at several youth birding camps and as an interpretive naturalist for the Cape May Bird Observatory in New Jersey. This summer, he led tours in Yellowstone National Park for Natural Habitat Adventures, a wildlife company. The frequent travel makes it difficult to settle down with a girlfriend, he said, but he summed up his feeling with a German word, zugunruhe, a birding term that describes the restlessness that prompts birds to migrate. "I'm always thinking about the next trip," he said.
We'll be featuring more profiles of project participants. If you want to share your birding journey and be considered for a profile, please email birds@nytimes.com.
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Friday, August 25, 2023
Science Times: How temperature swings affect birds
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