Birds are laying their eggs earlier, and climatechange is to blame
Spring is in the air. Birds are singing and beginning to build their nests. It happens every year, like clockwork. But a new study in theshows that many species of birds are nesting and laying eggs nearly a month earlier than they did a hundred years ago. By comparing recent observations with century-old eggs preserved in museum collections, scientists were able to determine that about a third of the bird species nesting in Chicago have moved their egg-laying up by an average of 25 days.
The egg collection itself occupies a small room crammed full with floor-to-ceiling cabinets, each containing hundreds of eggs, most of which were collected a century ago. The eggs themselves are stored in small boxes and accompanied by labels, often hand-written, saying what kind of bird they belong to, where they're from, and precisely when they were collected, down to the day.
The researchers then had two big sets of nesting data: one from roughly 1880-1920, and another from about 1990 to 2015."There's a gap in the middle, and that's where Mason Fidino came in," says Bates.
In addition to illustrating that birds are laying eggs earlier, the researchers looked for a reason why. Given that the climate crisis has dramatically affected so many aspects of biology, the researchers looked to rising temperatures as a potential explanation for the earlier nesting. But the scientists hit another snag: there aren't consistent temperature data for the region going back that far. So, they turned to a proxy for temperature: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over time neatly maps onto larger temperature trends, and the researchers found that it also correlated with the changes in egg-laying dates. "Global climate change has not been linear over this nearly 150-year period, and therefore species may not have advanced their lay date in non-linearly as well. Therefore, we included both linear and non-linear trends within our model," says Fidino.
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