California’s Birds Are Testing New Survival Tactics on a Vast Scale
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/science/california-birds-climate-change.html
Source: By Wallace Ravven, The New York Times.
Excerpt: More than a century ago, zoologist Joseph Grinnell launched a pioneering survey of animal life in California, ...to all corners and habitats of the state, from Death Valley to the High Sierra. ...Grinnell ...produced one of the richest ecological records in the world: 74,000 pages of meticulously detailed field notes, recording the numbers, habits and habitats of all vertebrate species that the team encountered. In 2003, ...Morgan Tingley, ... an ecology graduate student at the university, ...wanted to know how birds had fared since Grinnell last took a census. ...Dr. Tingley and his colleagues discovered that most species now nest about a week earlier than they did 70 to 100 years ago. That slight advance in timing translates into nesting temperatures about two degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the birds would encounter had they not moved up their breeding time — almost exactly counterbalancing the two-degree rise in average temperatures recorded over the last century. ...Early nesting has been noted in individual bird species, but such a widespread behavioral change over a very large and varied landscape was “not on the radar at all,” said Jacob Socolar, a postdoctoral scientist in Dr. Tingley’s lab. ...The study of 202 species showed that most of them are adapting to rising temperatures with “overlooked flexibility,” the scientists reported — unexpected hope for wildlife in an uncertain time. “Does it mean climate change is not bad for you? No,” said Dr. Tingley, now an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut. “But any time we find that a species has more adaptive mechanisms to cope with climate change, that’s a good thing.”....
Source: By Wallace Ravven, The New York Times.
Excerpt: More than a century ago, zoologist Joseph Grinnell launched a pioneering survey of animal life in California, ...to all corners and habitats of the state, from Death Valley to the High Sierra. ...Grinnell ...produced one of the richest ecological records in the world: 74,000 pages of meticulously detailed field notes, recording the numbers, habits and habitats of all vertebrate species that the team encountered. In 2003, ...Morgan Tingley, ... an ecology graduate student at the university, ...wanted to know how birds had fared since Grinnell last took a census. ...Dr. Tingley and his colleagues discovered that most species now nest about a week earlier than they did 70 to 100 years ago. That slight advance in timing translates into nesting temperatures about two degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the birds would encounter had they not moved up their breeding time — almost exactly counterbalancing the two-degree rise in average temperatures recorded over the last century. ...Early nesting has been noted in individual bird species, but such a widespread behavioral change over a very large and varied landscape was “not on the radar at all,” said Jacob Socolar, a postdoctoral scientist in Dr. Tingley’s lab. ...The study of 202 species showed that most of them are adapting to rising temperatures with “overlooked flexibility,” the scientists reported — unexpected hope for wildlife in an uncertain time. “Does it mean climate change is not bad for you? No,” said Dr. Tingley, now an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut. “But any time we find that a species has more adaptive mechanisms to cope with climate change, that’s a good thing.”....