Changes in annual bird counts are warnings to us that our world is at risk

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 constant stress. Though habitat loss from urban encroachment 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.

Climate change imposes additional stressors that affect birds. Sea level rise has been documented along the Atlantic Coast since 1823 when the Navy moved into Key West. Even small changes in sea level alter the width of the beach and the depth of coastal waters where shorebirds and wading birds feed. Global warming contributes to extreme heat waves and elevated ocean temperatures, which produce more intense tropical storms with greater rainfall amounts, reducing the salinity of estuaries. Warmer waters ignite harmful algal blooms with associated seagrass die-offs, fish kills and bird deaths. During an algal bloom in 2015, over 300 Brown Pelicans died.

Like many Audubon members, I’ve participated in the annual Christmas Bird Count 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 Oct. 1 and remained until he departed on March 1. We called him Hugo because his arrival in 1989 was delayed, which we blamed on Hurricane Hugo, which 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 to an otherwise arduous journey that 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 subfreezing temperatures and gale-force winds and trudged through the 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 90 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 hot spot 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 wrote about it like it was a team sport. In the early 1960s, 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 83 birds along the entire east coast of Florida.Two of Florida’s iconic pink species are reacting to the changes in climate. Roseate spoonbills were completely killed off in Florida before the turn of the 20th century as their bright pink feathers were favored for ladies' hats. Once they were protected, some returned to the Everglades, but in the early 1990s, 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 were 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 the 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 among 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.