Category: ANIMALS_CN

One night in 2008, Deborah Fleshman awoke in her bed to find that her legs had turned beetroot red. Welts, some a foot wide, had appeared along her torso.

It’s an annual harbinger of spring: Birds singing, building nests, and laying eggs. But the timetable has been gradually changing. A new study finds that many bird species are building their nests and laying eggs nearly a month earlier than they did a century ago.1

Given the rate at which the waters in the Gulf of Maine are heating up, Mainers may need to swap out the lobsters on their license plates for squid. All of New England could issue new specialty plates featuring creatures threatened by the speed climate change is slamming the gulf: a critically endangered right whale, a cute puffin or a vanishing cod.

New UN report highlights how warming temperatures are upending nature’s life cycles — with devastating impacts on agriculture and biodiversity.

The world’s biodiversity is constantly being threatened by warming temperatures and extreme changes in climate and weather patterns.
And while that “doom and gloom” is the typical discourse surrounding how climate change is affecting biodiversity, another interesting aspect of the warming temperatures is how different species have been adapting over the decades, as the warming progresses, experts say.

Thousands of birds die each spring and fall when they collide with Chicago’s skyscrapers, which lie on a major migration path between Canada and Latin America.
But the birds don’t die in vain. Since the 1970s, many of them have been collected from the street and cataloged by the city’s Field Museum. This unique and detailed set of data has been a scientific windfall, revealing that North American migratory birds appear to be shrinking in response to climate change.

Sara Bogard halted her dog as the two began descending the cliff down to Manchester Beach, along the Mendocino coast. Below, scores of dead and dying birds littered the beach as far as she could see. “The smell hit me first,” said Bogard, describing the musty, basement-like odor of northern fulmars scattered along the beach that mid-December morning. The smell, she recalled, was “kind of like a grandmother’s closet.”

The National Butterfly Center, with its serene grounds along the Rio Grande in South Texas, is always a big draw for tourists and locals living on the border. Now, a four-fold increase in butterfly species recently recorded at the facility is drawing even larger crowds. But it has some environmentalists worried that rare butterflies migrating from Central and South America are coming farther north due to global climate change.

It’s no news that climate change is impacting our natural environment, but what does this mean for birds, migration patterns, and lasting biodiversity? As winter tends to get warmer, why are birds still migrating? What makes them migrate in the first place?

Caribou are highly adapted to extreme environmental variability, which has allowed them to endure dramatic, historic changes, including multiple ice ages. However, current climate change is happening 2-3 times faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet and perhaps at an unprecedented rate. The key question is: Can caribou, particularly in the face of significant changes in land use and development in the Arctic, keep up with these changes?