PTI
Washington, April 4
Climate change may be causing many species of birds to nest and lay eggs up to a month earlier than they did a century ago, according to a study conducted in the US.
These bird species, including killdeer, yellow warblers and field sparrows, are now laying their eggs 25 days earlier, on average, than they were 100 years ago, the researchers said.
For migratory bird species, earlier spring warm-up could lead to a mismatch between nesting activities and food availability, they said.
The team led by researchers at the Field Museum of Natural History in the US assessed changes in nesting dates of 72 bird species in the Upper Midwest of the US.
The study, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, compared contemporary lay dates with those obtained from archived, historical museum nest records over a 143-year period (1872-2015).
The researchers noted that global climate change impacts species and ecosystems in potentially harmful ways.
They used carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration as a proxy for temperature and an environmental indicator of climate change as the temperature data was not available for an entire time period.
Overall, the researchers found that lay dates advanced about 10 days over the 143-year period.
Resident, short-distance migrants and long-distance migrants lay dates advanced by about 15, 18 and 16 days on average respectively, they said.
“Twenty-four species (33.3 per cent) significantly advanced, one (1.4 per cent) significantly delayed and we failed to detect an advance or delay in lay date for 47 species (65.3 per cent),” the authors of the study said.
“Overall, mean advance in first lay date (for the species that have significantly advanced laying date) was 25.1 days,” they said.
The study highlights the scientific importance of both data gathering and archiving through time to understand phenological change, the researcher said.
Such data will provide the ability to track, understand and perhaps predict responses to human-driven environmental change, they added.
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