Climate Change Or Glitch?
All summer long, I had been commenting to birders and others who keep
an eye on the natural scene about the extreme shortage of many species
of small birds that one would normally expect to see in numbers around
here, especially during the warm months. I had been hoping, I guess,
that I had been simply missing them - this had been a very busy summer
and I had not had the opportunity to check for birds nearly as
frequently as I normally do, or would have liked to do. However, none
of them were able to offer much by way of encouraging,
counterbalancing observations.
Well, it is becoming clearer now that my impressions were accurate, and
that they were not confined to the local area. In recent days I have
several reports that populations of small insectivores - swallows,
warblers, flycatchers and the like - are at their lowest numbers since
people have been keeping records, especially here in the northeast.
We had a pretty good population of Alder flycatchers in our overgrown
field up by the garden, and I could find good numbers of American
redstarts, common yellowthroats, red-eyed vireos, and Nashville
warblers in habitat where I would expect to find them. But that was
about it: the Yellow-rumped warbler is usually the most common of all,
but I think that I saw one all summer this year. In a normal year, I
can count on finding several individuals of another ten or twelve
species of warbler - this summer, I doubt that I found even single
individuals of six of them.
I did not see a single barn swallow in the area all summer. I can
remember having ten or twelve pairs of them nesting in the old barn in
Balmoral and when I first moved to Pt. laNim, seeing them in good
numbers around the neighbour's barns. Tree swallows were just about as
scarce and the only colony of Bank swallows that I could find was that
one on the Bon Ami Rocks - and even there the numbers were less than
half of what I would expect to see in a "normal" year.
Sadly, the evidence is beginning to mount that we are going to have to
redefine "normal" in terms that more closely resemble what we have been
noticing increasingly not just this past summer but over the last three
or four years.The culprit, at least locally, seems to be the rash of
deplorable weather that we have been experiencing in what passes for
spring. One might recall the weeks of rain and cold of last May and
June. It might take good records to recall that that had been the
pattern for the past several. I can recall one day in early June when I
actually found small dead birds lying on my footpaths; it appears that
they had simply dropped out of the trees from cold, exhaustion, and
starvation.
These birds arrive here on a tight schedule, one that has been honed
over the millennia to coincide with the first big hatches of insects.
With retarded warmth, insects don't hatch - and the birds starve.
Climate change, or simply a glitch in a normal pattern? Time will tell;
unfortunately for many of these birds, time is not on their side: three
or four such springs in a row will mean simply that we are going to
have to get used to a whole different cast, one made up of birds that
can make do on plants and seeds. The swallows, I fear, will not be
returning to the North Shore.
