Birds at Risk from Climate Change
Birds at Risk from Climate Change
Birding and bird conservation has long been important to my personal and professional life. Growing up in coastal Florida, colorful and exotic birds were part of the landscape. Unlike most children, my daughter’s first word was not Mom or Dad, but was “buurd.”
Birds in Florida and many other places now live in continuous stress. Though habitat loss from the constant pressure of growth remains the biggest concern, Florida is also on the front lines of climate change. I recently co-authored a report listing the effects of climate change on the Indian River Lagoon. This 156-mile estuary along Florida’s east coast, is considered the most biologically diverse in North America, including the 370 bird species recorded there. Climate change now puts this biodiversity at risk.
We found that climate change imposes additional stressors in several ways and that affect birds. Sea level rise has been documented along the Atlantic Coast since 1821 when the Navy moved into Key West and Jacksonville. Even small changes in sea level alters the width of the beach and the depth of coastal waters where shorebirds and wading birds feed. Global warming brings extreme heat waves and tepid waters which produce more intense tropical storms with greater rainfall amounts changing the salinity of estuaries. Warmer waters ignite harmful algal blooms with associated sea grass die offs, fish kills, and kill birds as well. During an algal bloom in 2015, over 300 Brown Pelicans died.
Like many Audubon members, I’ve participated in the annual Christmas Bird County over three decades. For most of those years I coordinated the same area near my home. We joked that we knew some of those birds by name. One of them was Hugo, a Great Blue Heron, who arrived on my dock each year on October 1st and remained until he departed on March 1st. We called him Hugo because his arrival in 1989 was delayed which we blamed on Hurricane Hugo that slammed into Charleston in late September. Hugo is a visible example that birds time their migration to the angle of the sun. They have no idea what the weather is going to be during migration but with changes in climate patterns, migration becomes harder adding more stress on an otherwise arduous journey which can exceed several thousand miles.
For a few years we participated in the Cape Ann Christmas Bird Count, just north of Boston. We joined very serious birders who braced against the sub-freezing temperatures, gale force winds and trudged through deep snow of a typical New England winter. This count circle is one of the oldest in the country with records that stretch back over ninety years. But the 2023 CBC was off the charts. It was a record-breaking year as they counted 124 species including four species never seen before. According to NOAA it was the warmest winter ever recorded in Massachusetts. There was no snow or frozen ponds on that 50-degree December day. It was a record count as many species didn’t head south for the winter.
Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge near Cape Canaveral is the preeminent birding hotspot on Florida’s east coast. I remember one Sunday afternoon driving to the refuge noticing the Space Shuttle gleaming on the launch pad. Many cars were pulled off to the side with people holding long lens cameras, binoculars, and spotting scopes, but with their backs to the Space Shuttle. They were looking at flocks of thousands of ducks and wading birds. The Christmas Bird Count for this area was famously the first to surpass the 200 species mark. It was so competitive that Sports Illustrated Magazine wrote about it like it was a team sport. In the early 1960’s the count recorded species numbers that ranged from 191 to 206. But for Christmas 2023, only 127 species were recorded there. American Robins were almost as plentiful at Cape Ann as Merritt Island.
In my youth, American Oystercatchers were a common sight along the local oyster bars. The clownish looking shorebird has a distinctive long orange beak and piercing yellow and orange eyes. They nest along the sand bars and oyster bars that rise just inches above the high tide line. Sea level rise now brings sunny day flooding which is taking its toll by flooding oystercatcher nests. These beautiful birds are now imperiled, and the most recent Christmas Bird Count recorded a mere eighty-three birds along the entire east coast of Florida.
Two of Florida’s iconic pink species are reacting to the changes in climate as well. Roseate Spoonbills were completely killed off in Florida before the turn of the 20th century as their bright pink feathers were favored for lady’s hats. Once they were protected, some returned to the Everglades, but in the early 1990’s many wading birds abandoned this highly impacted system and started moving north. After 1993, Spoonbills were quite common along the Indian River Lagoon, but in the last decade they have kept moving farther north. They now breed in North Florida and have been seen as far north as New England. American Flamingos present a similar story. They were plentiful when John James Audubon saw them in the Florida Keys in 1832 but gone by century end. Last year Hurricane Idalia blew a flock from Yucatan to Florida, and a recent count found 101 across the state. But they have also ventured out and one recently made it all the way to Cape Cod. This will only be a success story if the flamingo heads back south for the winter.
A recent study by National Audubon Society documents that two-thirds of North American birds are at risk of extinction from climate change. Changes in weather patterns confound the niches that each species has historically used for survival. Shrinking habitat creates unnecessary stressful competition amongst species to survive. Like the “canary in the coal mine,” these birds are trying to tell us the world as we know it is now at risk.
