As climate warms, more bird nests are destroyed in farmlands

A new study shows that birds have shifted the time of their breeding much more quickly than Finnish farmers are anticipating their sowing times. This means that more birds are laying their eggs on fields that are still to be sown, a mismatch in timing that is most likely fatal for the bird nests.

"As the eggs of Curlew and Lapwings are placed on unsown fields, they are likely to be run over by farming machinery during sowing operations even if farmers were willing to avoid nest destructions," says researcher Andrea Santangeli from Finnish Museum of Natural History, part of the University of Helsinki.

Modern agriculture is catastrophic for farmland wildlife

The rush to produce more food to feed an ever-increasing society has led to unprecedented transformations in farmland over the past 50 years. The challenge of increasing crop yields was met by making extensive use of chemicals, like pesticides and herbicides to remove pests and weeds, and by making fields larger and homogeneous.

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As climate is warming up, more bird nests are destroyed in Finnish farmland

Date:  January 11, 2018

Source:  University of Helsinki

Summary:

Finnish farmers are adapting to the warming climate by anticipating the time when they sow their fields in the spring. At the same time, birds have also advanced the time of breeding as the spring temperatures are becoming milder in response to climate change.

A new study shows that birds have shifted the time of their breeding much faster than the farmers are anticipating their sowing times in Finnish farmland. This means that more birds are nowadays laying their eggs on fields that are still to be sown, a mismatch in timing that is most likely fatal for the bird nests.

"As the eggs of curlew and lapwings are placed on unsown fields, they are likely to be run over by farming machinery during sowing operations even if farmers were willing to avoid nest destructions," says researcher Andrea Santangeli from Finnish Museum of Natural History, which is part of University of Helsinki.

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Breeding flexibility helps migratory songbirds adjust to climate warming

Date: November 13, 2015

Source: Dartmouth College

Phenological mismatches, or a mistiming between creatures and the prey and plants they eat, is one of the biggest known impacts of climate change on ecological systems. But a Dartmouth-led study finds that one common migratory songbird has a natural flexibility in its breeding time that has helped stave off mismatches, at least for now.

The results suggest this flexibility provides a buffer against climate warming for the black-throated blue warbler in eastern North America and potentially for other migratory forest birds in temperate zones, but such resilience probably has limits.

The study appears in the journal Oikos. The research included scientists from Dartmouth College, Norwegian Institute of Nature Research, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and Wellesley College.

"Understanding the effects of climate warming on ecological systems is critical for the conservation of forest bird species and their habitats," says lead author Nina Lany, who conducted the study as part of her doctoral degree at Dartmouth and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University.

The researchers studied the causes and consequences of year-to-year variation over 25 years in the breeding time of the black-throated blue warbler in the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. They compared its breeding time and success to the timing of spring leaf-out and the availability of the leaf-feeding caterpillars eaten by birds. The timing of spring leaf-out varies by as much as a month from year to year in hardwood forests of the northeastern United States. This variability poses a challenge to migratory birds that migrate from the tropics and then time their breeding to maximize reproductive success.

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