Silent Skies: The Top 7 Birds Most Threatened by Climate Change

The bird song of sunrise, the brilliance of nature in our trees, the complex dance of migration- we can not imagine our planet without birds. Traditionally they have been accustomed to a changing world, but never on this scale and at this rate. The effects of climate change on birds are not some threat in the far future, but are currently increasing in potency and damaging the ecological stability the birds rely on to survive.

With everything melting in the Arctic to the reefs fading in the blue, the impacts of a heating earth are resulting in a chain of tribulations. In the case of our feathered friends, that translates into changing food sources, the loss of their natural habitats, changing migration routes, and susceptibility to the worst weather of all. The paper explores the experiences of seven incredible species of birds as the war on the environment is fought at the frontiers. Their plight is an eloquent statement of how global warming is impacting wildlife as well as a clarion call to do something about it.

1. The Atlantic Puffin: The Clown of the Sea in Crisis

Scientific Name: Fratercula arctica

Primary Threat: Prey collapse due to ocean warming and acidification.

The North Atlantic Puffin is a charismatic endearing and colorful User of The Atlantic. But what is hidden behind its short and cute facade is the bird struggling to survive. Puffins consume specific nutrient-rich fish which include hake, sand lance and herring to feed their chick hatchlings commonly referred to as puffling.

Actual role of the climate change on birds such as puffin is mediated via food web. Due to rising temperatures in ocean areas, these cold-water fish are shifting to the north or deeper cold water areas, thus getting outside of the scope of the puffin feeding areas. Parents have to re-feed on less nutritious fish or larger fish that do not fit in the gullet of chicks, thus causing breeding failures. In certain important colonies chicks have died in large numbers through starvation, due to this shift to prey animals.

Moreover, they can wash out their nests with chicks and eggs due to storm surges resulting in greater frequency and intensity of storms another symptom of climate change. The marine habitat which has supported puffin colonies over the ages is growing vulnerable and non-conducive.

2. The Emperor Penguin: On Thinning Ice

Scientific Name: Aptenodytes forsteri

Primary Threat: Loss of sea-ice breeding habitat.

The Emperor Penguin is the picture of resilience in the Antarctic and nestled in direst conditions the globe over. Their life cycle in its entirety is directly connected with land-fast sea ice. They nest on it, rear their young on it and it serves as a launching pad into a foraging period.

Global warming impacts on the wildlife are most felt at the poles. The sea ice in the Antarctic is melting earlier and forming later than at any time previously. This shortens the critical window allowed to Emperor parents to bring up their chicks to their independence. Providing the ice breaks up prior to the chick acquiring waterproof feathers, it will drown or freeze.

A recent study suggests that, because of the current warming trend, more than 90 percent of Emperor Penguin colonies will be close to extinct by the end of the century. It is a dire illustration of a species whose home is physically disappearing, and they have no place to live. They are already endangered under the Endangered Species Act and a major threat afflicting them is climate change.

3. The Snowy Owl: A Symbol of the North in a Warming World

Scientific Name: Bubo scandiacus

Primary Threat: Ecosystem mismatch and declining lemming populations.

The Snowy Owl, the proud bird famous as Harry Potter s Hedwig is a conqueror of the Arctic tundra. Its reproduction and survival are closely connected with the ecological cycles of lemmings, or rodents, which go through vast reproduction cycles of their own. In years when food abundance is good, Snowy Owls are capable of successfully laying large clutches of eggs producing broods of owlets.

Climate change is drastically interfering with this friend -enemy relationship. Hotter winters and snowfall patterns lead to a change in insulative qualities of the snowpack, consequently affecting the habitat (subnivean or under-snow habitat), where lemmings survive, breed, and feed. Unpredictable weather such as rain-on-snow events are capable of forming impenetrable ice layers, crashing lemming populations.

The Snowy Owls breed less often and with lower success when there are less lemmings. This has the result of even smaller populations which are less tolerant of other pressures. Moreover, with the changing tundra habitat there are reports that Snowy Owls are migrating further south during winter seasons in worse bodily condition which is considered as a sign of stress on the whole ecosystem.

4. The Maui Parrotbill: A Tiny Honeycreeper on the Brink

Scientific Name: Pseudonestor xanthophrys

Primary Threat: Disease range expansion and habitat loss.

The Maui Parrotbill or Kiwikiu is a critically endangered songbird endemic to the rainforest in high elevations on Maui, Hawaii. After just a few hundreds of individuals remained, it was already on a tightrope on its way to extinction. The threat of global warming is causing that rope to shake.

The major novel threat is proliferation of mosquito-borne diseases, especially avian malaria. The Hawaiian birds are natively without immunity against this imported disease. The mosquitoes were historically restricted to lower and warmer altitudes and this enabled the survival of birds such as the parrotbill to survive in cool, mosquito free highlands.

With the rising temperature in the planet the mosquitoes have been migrating up the mountains. The mosquito line is creeping skyward with each passing year infiltrating the last remnants of secure bird habitat. In Kiwikiu jargon, there is simply nowhere any higher to go. Conservationists are in a race against time to move the birds to cooler more pristine enclaves and even consider genetic methods to control upon the mosquitoes.While this is radical and going against nature, the concept of genetic control is being mulled over as field conservation is not proving to be effective as a method in saving the population of birds.

5. The Common Loon: The Haunting Call of a Changing North

Scientific Name: Gavia immer

Primary Threat: Habitat loss from changing water levels and mercury poisoning.

This other-worldly, yet beautiful call of the Common Loon is itself a sound of northern lakes. These species of birds are a herald species because they signify the wellness of their freshwater ecologies. Regrettably, they are reflecting that things are taking a wrong direction.

The rise in climate changes is causing changes in the lakes as more periods of droughts, floods and fluctuating patterns of rains take place. Reduced water levels might bring the loon nests into the reach of predators or isolate the nests from the water surface so that the nests cannot be reached by parents. Increased heavy rains also carry away nests by flooding them out.

An even greater danger is the liberation of mercury. Warming climate and shifting water chemistry may enhance the transformation of mercury, the element, to methylmercury, the toxic substance, which accumulates in the food chain. Loons at the highest level in their food web have very high levels and end up damaging their nervous system, losing their fertility and poor parenting behavior ending up in a decline in their population.

6. The Sea Turtles... of the Bird World: The Magnificent Frigatebird

Scientific Name: Fregata magnificens

Primary Threat: Extreme weather events destroying nesting colonies.

Like other frigatebirds it is a master of the skies, pirating food in the other sea birds with breathtaking exploits of agility, but on land the Magnificent Frigatebird is monstrously vulnerable. Their nesting habitats are the dense colonies located on the low-lying islands and mangroves (mostly in the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico).

These are the hurricane hot zones of the region and the severity is growing because of warmer waters in the ocean. One direct impact of a major hurricane can destroy the whole year of chicks and eggs production besides destroying the nesting trees themselves. The adults can perish during the storm, but come back to their breeding site being destroyed.

With the increase in the intensity and, perhaps, the frequency of hurricanes and tropical storms, there is less recovery time allowed to the frigatebird colonies between the periods of devastating events. This results in the long-term reduction in population as such slow breeding birds cannot be replaced by such heavy and repeated losses.

7. The Clark's Nutcracker: The Forester Who Can't Keep Up

Scientific Name: Nucifraga columbiana

Primary Threat: Mismatch with its essential food source due to habitat shift.

The whitebark/pin tree and the clark nutcracker has a symbiotic relationship that is remarkable. The bird has a certain specialized beak to pick up the pine seeds which are then buried in thousands of caches by the bird to feed it during winter. Importantly, it does not reclaim all of them and the seeds that are not eaten become new trees. The nutcracker is literally the main planter of whole whitebark pine forest.

Climate change is rudely shutting this ancient alliance down Warming climate and extensive drought has allowed large-scale epidemics of mountain pine beetles, which kills whitebark pines. Another very dangerous and fast-spreading fungal disease white pine blister rust is also becoming more prominent in the warmer climatic conditions.

As the whitebark pines are dying out, the nutcracker has no longer its main food supply. Climate-related habitat loss is much higher than adaptation abilities of the bird and the capability of the ecosystem to change that process. This disappearance of the nut cracker, however, leads to no one left to grow the new trees and a vicious cycle ensues feeding off an entire ecosystem.

Conclusion: A Call to Listen and Act

These are not stand-alone tragedies which happened to these seven birds. They are a few examples of the massive climate change effect on birds across the globe. A study undertaken in 2019 calculated that almost 3 billion birds have been lost in North America since the 1970s due to a number of existing hazards compounded by climate change.

However, in this crisis there is a silver lining. It is through these stories that we come to be in a position to author a new ending. Some of these changes we can make are contributing to conservation agencies, ways to decrease our carbon footprint, communicating and influencing policymakers on climate-friendly decisions, and establishing bird-friendly habitats right in our backyards.

The muffled skies we have--not only is it their loss, but also ours. Birds are food sources, pollinators, pest-consumers, and seed-distributors, and key ecosystem indicators of the health of our planet. Their life shares common destiny with ours. Protecting their future is in turn protecting ours, so the dawn chorus can ring out throughout future generations.