From Duke University , another Durban doozy, yes we’ll have roasted fowl in the trees because they may not be moving fast enough.
DURHAM, N.C. — Tropical birds are moving to higher elevations because of climate change, but they may not be moving fast enough, according to a new study by Duke University researchers.
The study, published Thursday in the peer-reviewed online journal PLoS ONE, finds that the birds aren’t migrating as rapidly as scientists previously anticipated, based on recorded temperature increases.
The animals instead may be tracking changes in vegetation, which can only move slowly via seed dispersal.
“This is the first study to evaluate the effects of warming on the elevation ranges of tropical birds,” said Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of conservation ecology at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and a co-author of the study. “It provides new evidence of their response to warming, but also shows there is a delay in their response.”
Evidence from temperate areas, such as North America and Europe, shows that many animal and plant species are adapting to climate change by migrating northward, breeding earlier or flowering earlier in response to rising temperatures.
“However, our understanding of the response of tropical birds to warming is still poor,” said German Forero-Medina, a Ph.D. student at Duke’s Nicholas School who is lead author of the new study. “Moving to the north doesn’t help them, because tropical temperatures do not change very much with latitude. So moving up to higher elevations is the only way to go, but there are few historical data that can serve as baselines for comparison over time.”
What is going on with tropical species at higher altitudes is important, Forero-Medina said, because about half of all birds species live 3,500 feet or more above sea level, and of these species, more than 80 percent may live within the tropics.
In 2010, the authors of the new study and a team of biologists participated in an expedition to the summit of the remote Cerros del Sira mountains in central Peru – a place visited by only a few ornithologists on prior occasions. The complex topography, geology and climate of the mountains have produced isolated patches of habitat with unique avian communities and distinct taxa.
Forero-Medina and his colleagues used survey data collected on bird species in the region in the 1970s by John Terborgh, research professor emeritus at Duke, to compare past and present distributions.
“Using John Terborgh’s groundbreaking data — the first ever collected from this region –gave us a unique opportunity to understand the effects of 40 years of warming on tropical birds,” Forero-Medina says.
The biologists found that although the ranges of many bird species have shifted uphill since Terborgh’s time, the shifts fell short of what scientists had projected based on temperature increases over the four decades.
“This may be bad news,” Pimm said. “Species may be damned if they move to higher elevations to keep cool and then simply run out of habitat. But, by staying put, they may have more habitat but they may overheat.”
CITATION: “Elevational Ranges of Birds on a Tropical Montane Gradient Lag Behind Warming Temperatures” German Forero-Medina, John Terborgh, S. Jacob Socolar & Stuart L. Pimm. PLoS ONE, Dec. 7, 2011.
Hmmmmm….. What would Darwin call this?
Natural selection leading to natural evolution, as a result of natural climate change.
Just the way God intended…..
Right now I’m watching a set of 20 quail who favor my tiny yard. Temperature is 27F. The quail are foraging, making that wonderful little burble-noise that says “We’re all here… we’re all here…”
Back in July the same set of quail were foraging in 93F, making that wonderful little burble-noise that says “We’re all here… we’re all here…”
I hate to think what will happen when they have to adapt to a range of daytime temps from 29 to 95 instead of 27 to 93! They’ll roast for sure.
The real problem, of course, is that modern “scientists” have never heard of negative feedback. All their theories work beautifully on linear stuff like stainless steel bars, but fail on living things.
This paper is a real can of worms. First, the temperature is supposed to have risen 0.79 degrees C between 1969 and 2010. Pretty exact eh? Particularly for an isolated mountain in the Amazon with no weather stations nearby. So where does it come from? From a gridded climate database called CRU TS 2.1. Now where did I hear that before? Oh now I remember: “Harry_read_me”.
Then the original raw data indicated that the birds had moved 92 +- 21.5 meters uphill, but this figure was “adjusted” for the different number of birds caught in 1969 and 2010 to 49 +- 17.3 meters. Now that is a pretty big adjustment, something like 45 % as a matter of fact. The adjustment may be statistically sound, the description is too vague to be certain, but there sure as hell is no way that the uncertainty of an “adjusted” number can be smaller than that of the original data. Nor can you ever hope to measure the altitudinal range of a bird with a precision of 0.1 meter (= 0.00053 degrees, if the lapse rate is really as low as 0.53 degrees/100 as they claim)
Finally they seem to have missed just why Terborgh chose to study this isolated mountain with a very impoverished montane avifauna. It was because since it was isolated no invasion of competing highland birds was possible, so it was possible to determine the importance of competition relative to other factors that affect bird distribution (such as climate) by comparing it with an avifauna in the main Andes. Terborgh incidentally found that competition was very important for altitudinal distribution.
In the paper they state: “Land use conversion had destroyed some of the lower elevation sites from 1969”. Now what does that mean? That there can be no invasion of lower altitude forest bird species when temperatures rise (if they do) and consequently no particular reason for the montane birds to move upward.
The authors have made a very simple and unfortunately very common mistake, They believe that organisms are unable to live outside the exact range that they are found in today. This is almost never true. In most cases the ranges are influenced by humans (by cutting down the lowland forests for example) or by competition from other organisms, and by a myriad of other factors in addition to climate.
Could it be that rising CO2 is causing increased plant growth in the birds’ current environment, hence increased food directly for the birds that are herbivores and indirectly for birds that feed on insects (that feed on plants)? As said by others above, the birds will be found where their food is found.
Just as with tree ring proxies that turn out to correlate better with water availability than temperature, the location of birds may correlate with any of the factors related to availability of food.
I think more birds and bats will be killed by wind turbines than by man made global warming
Total hog wash.
I spend much time in the tropics in the middle of a big bird resort and I haven’t observed any of the claimed events.
Besides that there is no change in temperatures.
Yet another University to blacklist. Don’t send your kids there.
They will be turned into eco nazi’s and hunt you for the remainder of your life (LOL)
I feel quite certain that in the Little Ice Age, the birds were at lower altitudes…and still, might have been colder than 40 years ago.
I feel the same way about the Holocene Optimum of 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, the warmest period of our interglacial (even Michael Mann hasn’t gotten around to trying to pretend otherwise). Of course in that time frame, the birds were likely far higher up the mountains, just as the Arctic appears to have been nearly ice free for small parts of the summer at that time, as previously reported in WUWT, but not in the W Post or NY Times or CBC or ABC or CNN…..
finds that the birds aren’t migrating as rapidly as scientists previously anticipated, based on recorded temperature increases.
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So then it’s obviously the birds fault…..since those recorded temp increases are so accurate
…..wonder if the birds found Mr. T’s missing heat?
Perhaps someone should show this particular PhD student a globe. They may then understand (although I am making an assumption) that ‘North’ is not always away from the equator.
Yah think it may because things have not warmed enough to make any difference to these birds? Just maybe? Oh, no, of course not. It means they are all going to die!
Hugh Pepper says:
December 8, 2011 at 9:37 am
I prefer to stay in the ‘real’ reality, not an imagined one like this guy is hyperventilating about.
To timg56
What they really are saying is: since the study outcome was, lucky for us, not as expected we need more time, sorry that is money, to continue our “scientific” research. The next report will also be littered with unexpected results, which will lead to the need for more studies to come to a better “understanding” why birds don’t want to move up the mountain as fast as the researchers want them to go.
And the gravy train keeps on rolling. All aboard, all aboard.
Climate Scientists to birds…. “Yer Doing It Wrong”!
Or
“Birds, Natures Feathered Deniers!”
Of course, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that maybe their predictions and expectations of what the birds SHOULD DO are in error. Maybe the birds as a collective have done exactly what is necessary and don’t need to do anything more. Maybe this proves that birds, even with their little compact brain, are none-the-less smarter than the average climate scientist.
After careful reading of the peer reviewed study, I think the author is suggesting that coconuts migrate.
Classic ‘Conservation Biology’ BS. To reiterate, as i have here too many times already…. I know it may be difficult to imagine but this post-normal model based “mission oriented” (missionary) pseudoscience is WORSE than AGW Climastology.
So “there are few historical data that can serve as baselines for comparison over time.”
That is misleading in the first place but, if that was the problem, then shouldn’t they have done this study where there most the most historical data available?
So where did they go?
“to the summit of the remote Cerros del Sira mountains in central Peru – a place visited by only a few ornithologists on prior occasions.”
Now why would they go there? Why not go where the most data was available? Oh yes, academic politics for starters. There was “survey data collected on bird species in the region in the 1970s by John Terborgh, research professor emeritus at Duke.” His “groundbreaking data — the first ever collected from this region.”
Read carefully. See the word “region”? Used twice?
“Since 1973 Terborgh has operated Cocha Cashu Biological Station, a tropical ecology research station in Manú National Park, Peru.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Terborgh
Follow the links to see where that is, in this “region.” So we are supposed to believe that his data was sufficient to base this comparison on? LOL.
“the shifts fell short of what scientists [= junk models] had projected”
And this just speaks for itself:
“This may be bad news,” Pimm said. “Species may be damned if they move to higher elevations to keep cool and then simply run out of habitat. But, by staying put, they may have more habitat but they may overheat.”
Recently we had a reasonable sounding guest post here from Professor Robert G. Brown of Duke University (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/02/foia-is-not-enough-why-not-legally-mandate-transparency-in-climate-research-a-modest-proposal/).
I think he needs to start in his own back yard and extend his ideas to the junk pseudoscience conveniently named Conservation Biology.
RaymondT says:
December 8, 2011 at 12:25 pm
I think RaymondT has opened the lid on this can of wriggling bird food.
When the students of Duke University are tired of Peru there is a big opportunity for some funded research down to one of Australia’s biggest hidden gems – Lord Howe island – an isolated volcanic island paradise 400 miles North East of Sydney which has been the home of over 200 species of birds for thousands of years.
But of late the birds have been moving. And so has the unique phasmid, otherwise known as Dryococelus australis or a land lobster or stick insect and possibly the rarest insect in the world:
http://arovingiwillgo.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/img_0491-copy.jpg
By 1930 the early human settlers on the Lord Howe Island noticed that the phasmid had completely disappeared. Not one was ever found again – that is until 2001 when by chance an expedition onto nearby Ball’s Pyramid – a majestic rock rising out of the ocean – found a small population under a single Melaleuca shrub:
http://www.odditycentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/balls-pyramid3.jpg
Thanks to the phasmid’s determined will to survive and a magnificent rescue effort by a team of intrepid scientists, they are now being rebred in a controlled habitat on Lord Howe Island through the Natural Heritage Trust.
But what caused their close call to extinction? Was it global warming? Was it the rising sea levels? Or was it the voracious black rats which inhabited the island when the supply ship SS Makambo ran aground in 1918?
And is it more likely that the tropical birds from central Peru are fleeing from one of the 600 species of reptiles or chinchillas or foxes or even the invasive rat? We do know that the Peru had the highest incidence of bubonic plague in the world.
Perhaps after Lord Howe, Duke University could do a study to find out whether rats are threatening Peruvian bird populations? Or is global warming much more fashionable?
G. Karst says:
December 8, 2011 at 9:53 am
I have never seen birds (other than overcrowded chickens/turkeys) die and fall to the ground, due to warmth. I have, however, one -40 F day, observed sparrows and chickadees, drop one by one, to the ground due to the killing cold. Warming is a pleasant walk in the park. GK
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http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/thousands-of-birds-die-in-sweltering-heat/story-e6frg12c-1111118551504
This study seems to be chasing the wrong influence, the birds follow their food supply.
So, what is their food supply doing ?
Follow the plant fruits, seeds and insects.
In New Hampshire there is plenty of evidence, if you tramp about in the woods enough, of species shifting north during the MWP, and then south during the Little Ice Age. Some cold-prefering trees, such as sugar maples, were helped south by man, but other warmth-prefering species, such as catbrier and sassafras, made it north on their own, and still hang on in warm enclaves on the south slopes of hills, despite the fact it is too cold for them to live very far north of Cape Cod, under ordinary circumstances.
If species with roots can make the adjustment to rather dramatic shifts in temperature, it seems likely species with wings can do better.
Lord I hate science and PhD students……
They didn’t even back track to see if the birds were just returning to where they naturally were…
…..because the previous cold spell had driven them lower
Snapshot: Warming world stirs up cold waters : Nature Climate …
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n3/full/nclimate1129.html
by S Perkins – 2011
Jun 3, 2011 – Their analysis shows that from 1860, sea surface temperatures off Peru dropped about 1 °C over 90 years. After 1950, the rate of temperature
“birds aren’t migrating as rapidly as scientists previously anticipated, based on recorded temperature increases. ”
Could that it be the lack of “temperatrue increases” that is keeping the birds from migrating as “previsously anticipated”??
“The animals instead may be tracking changes in vegetation, which can only move slowly via seed dispersal.”
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Wait a minute….I thought animals were the main mover for seed dispersal.
I need to look that up, now where did I learn that?
Oh yeah….I school.
Did they stop teaching that, too?
oops In school
never learnt spelling too good
The 30 – 40 degree temperature swings daily in the California Central valley must then be killing birds right and left.
Anyone?