Birds are steadily moving north. Or at least those who can are.
“California Scrub Jays moved to Port Townsend the same year I did,” said Steve Hampton, speaking Tuesday to the Peregrine Audubon Society in Ukiah about how birds in Northern California are adapting to the changes in their environment caused by both rising temperatures and expanding wildfires.
“I love talking about birds and climate change,” said Hampton, who for many years assessed the damage caused by oil spills and other events for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. And though he now lives near Seattle, he grew up watching birds in Southern California and spent 30 years in Davis before moving to the Pacific Northwest, just as many many local birds have.
“Like California Quail – each morning, about 18 of them arrive like a herd of buffalo at my feeder in Port Townsend,” said Hampton, noting that such Northward Range Shifts are happening among many species. And trends, he said, are illustrated by the data collected for decades through annual Christmas Bird Counts, and more recently on the website eBird.
“The range shifts are how most birders document changes, and the papers on range shifts have used a lot of eBird data and Christmas bird counts, which is collected by you and me,” said Hampton, describing eBird’s recently released trend maps as “the coolest thing in the world.”
Birds are getting smaller and their wings larger, Hampton said. (Justine Frederiksen/The Ukiah Daily Journal)Overall, Hampton said, counts are showing consistently that while the Pacific Northwest is gaining numbers of birds, the deserts are losing birds. And the birds that remain, he said, are getting smaller in size as well as population.
“In the Mojave Desert, smaller birds do better,” said Hampton, explaining that many migrating birds are becoming smaller, as well, and “making up for their smaller muscle mass by having longer wings.”
And while so many birds are flying north that “they are getting Anna’s Hummingbirds every year in Alaska,” he said there are some birds who can’t leave their homes in California.
These include the Nuttall’s woodpecker, the Titmouse, and the California Towhee, which Hampton described as “really dependent on oaks, which don’t fly. And oaks don’t spread north like willows do.”
Oaks are also more vulnerable to the increasingly intense wildfires that California is experiencing, he said, noting that when looking at the footprints of recent “mega-fires on the eBird maps, you can see if the vegetation was chaparral, it will come back. But if it’s oaks, they may not come back, so I’m worried about oak-dependent species.”
Overall, though, Hampton said that birds are uniquely qualified to inhabit a warming planet, as they were the only creatures to survive the hottest day on Earth: the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum.
“The ducks and the chickens were the only creatures living after the meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs,” he said. “So birds will survive climate change, but there will be winners and losers. The winners will be generalists, like Scrub Jays. And the ones that will have the biggest challenges are specialists, like the ones that depend on oaks.”
“The thing about birds and climate change is: Each bird has different challenges and different thresholds,” he said, sharing a quote by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda that he said perfectly encapsulates why studying birds is one of the best ways to understand how our planet is changing: “Bird by bird, I’ve come to know the Earth.”
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