Climate change, migration and Menaka's epic birding day

This episode explores the impact of climate change on bird migration and conservation efforts, highlighted through a birding adventure at Point Pelee, Canada.

1. Bird populations in North America have significantly declined, with specific threats from habitat loss and climate change.
2. The internal and environmental triggers of bird migration are complex and sensitive to changes in climate.
3. Timing mismatches due to climate change can lead to severe reproductive consequences for birds.
4. Point Pelee serves as a critical refuge for migratory birds, intersecting major migratory paths.
5. Conservation efforts can mitigate some impacts, but more targeted actions are necessary to address the specific needs of at-risk species.

1: Introduction to Birding at Point Pelee

Menaka Raman-Willms introduces the day's goal to spot 100 birds at Point Pelee, a major migratory point in Canada, highlighting its ecological significance. Menaka Raman-Willms: "Point Pelee is like a stopover for migratory birds where two major highways in the sky meet."

2: The Science of Bird Migration

Experts explain the biological and psychological mechanisms behind bird migration, emphasizing the effects of climate change on these processes. Scott McDougall Shackleton: "Birds have an internal clock that helps them decide when to migrate, which is now being disrupted by climate changes."

3: Challenges Faced by Migratory Birds

Discussion on how habitat destruction, climate change, and human activities pose threats to bird populations, with a focus on conservation strategies. Scott McDougall Shackleton: "The mismatch in timing due to climate change is causing birds to miss critical food sources for their chicks."

4: Conservation Efforts and Closing Thoughts

The episode wraps up with insights into ongoing conservation efforts and reflections on the day's birding experience, stressing the importance of awareness and action. Menaka Raman-Willms: "Despite the challenges, community and scientific efforts continue to fight for the survival of these essential creatures."

1. Participate in local bird counts to help track population trends.
2. Support habitat conservation initiatives by donating to organizations like Birds Canada.
3. Reduce pesticide use in gardening to protect insectivorous birds.
4. Plant native species in your garden to provide natural food sources and shelter for birds.
5. Advocate for policies that protect critical bird habitats and address climate change impacts.

Point Pelee National Park juts out into Lake Erie like a finger, as every spring thousands of birds touch down on it. It’s a key stop along their migratory routes from the southern U.S., Central and South America to northern Canada.

But climate change has been shifting the conditions of migration, making it harder for some birds and ultimately affecting bird populations, which are already in steep decline. Decibel host Menaka Raman-Wilms, producer Rachel Levy-McLaughlin and Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee headed to Point Pelee to see spring migration up close.

A special thanks to Matt Fuirst and Birds Canada, and, as well as, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who provided some sounds from their Macaulay Library in this episode.

People

Scott McDougall Shackleton, Menaka Raman-Willms, Jeremy Bensett, Marcus G.

Companies

Western University, Birds Canada

Content Warnings:

None

Unidentified Speaker
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Menaka Raman-Willms
That's not a trumpet.

It's actually a swan, appropriately called the trumpeter swan.

It's all white with a black bill and it can weigh around 25 pounds.

All of that heft helps with its honk.

This species of swan was nearly extinct by the 18 hundreds, but theyve come back because of conservation efforts.

Even though birds exist all around us, most of us dont give them a second thought.

Birds play a vital role in sustaining our ecosystems. If you want to know about the health of an environment, just watch the bird populations.

And what theyre saying right now is that weve got some serious challenges.

Since 1970, weve lost 3 billion birds in North America, according to a 2019 study in the journal Science.

And climate change is making some of the current threats to birds even worse.

So to better understand these creatures, I headed to one of Canadas hottest birding spots with decibel producer Rachel Levy McLaughlin to see spring migration up close.

I'm manica Rammond Willms and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail.

Unidentified Speaker
All right, great.

Where are we going, Mainaka?

Menaka Raman-Willms
We are going to Leamington, Ontario, which is very close to Point Pele, which is where one of the biggest bird migrations happen. It's like this tiny little point that juts out.

And I think it's one of the southernmost, or if not the southernmost point in Canada.

I think it's the southernmost. Looking at the map.

Okay, 3 hours, 26 minutes and 20 seconds. Point pelee sticks out in Lake Erie and intersects two major bird migratory routes.

Think of it like two highways in the sky meeting. And there's a stop between them where you can refuel and rest.

Point Peely National park. Use the right lane to take exit 48 onto highway 77 toward Leamington.

And while the birds were making their way there, a lot of people were too.

Unidentified Speaker
The woman at the hotel told me that everyone staying at the hotel are birders.

She was like, are you a birder?

Menaka Raman-Willms
I was like, well, we're going to.

Unidentified Speaker
Talk to the birders.

Menaka Raman-Willms
That's very, very fun. Yes. So there's going to be lots of people doing the exact same thing we are. Yeah.

Unidentified Speaker
Everyone will be getting up early.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Getting up early.

Unidentified Speaker
Go see the birds.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Going to the park.

The next morning, we set out to find our birding crew.

Marcus G.
I'm Marcus G. And I write a column for the Globe and Mail. I'm kind of a lousy birder. Like, I'm an enthusiastic but a very poor birder.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Enthusiasm is the most important part, I guess.

Marcus G.
Yeah, I guess so. I'm always craning my neck and saying, what's that? What's that?

Jeremy Bensett
I'm Jeremy Bensett. I'm a local birder and tour guide in the Point Peely area.

We're on a quest to try to see 100 species of birds in the point Peely area today.

We're going to do our best to get there.

Menaka Raman-Willms
100 birds is ambitious, even with a professional guide like Jeremy. But we wanted to see if we could do it to truly understand how important this tiny slice of Canada is and what's at risk if climate patterns change there. That I was wondering. There's also a bird very similar with like a red stripe on it. Yes.

Oh, yeah, it does have red.

Jeremy Bensett
Yeah, red and yellow.

Marcus G.
Red wing bomber.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Red wing. Okay. Marcus has identified it. Our first bird of the day.

Jeremy Bensett
So, yeah, that's about a million of those.

Unidentified Speaker
And we're just standing here in the parking lot.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Right next to the parking lot. Yeah.

Part of the reason why point peely is teeming with birds is because it's full of food for them. And it's that abundance of food that draws my migratory birds away from their southern winter homes to come to Canada for the spring and summer to raise their young.

But that's only part of what drives migratory birds to fly hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers every spring.

Scott McDougall Shackleton
It depends on both an internal clock and response to the environment.

Menaka Raman-Willms
That's doctor Scott McDougall Shackleton, a professor of both psychology and biology who studies birds, their brains and migration.

He's also the director of Western University's advanced facility for avian research.

Scott McDougall Shackleton
Something internal lets them know that spring is coming.

And then they also respond to cues like the day's getting longer that can trigger a whole change in their brain, change in their hormone levels that will facilitate their spring migration.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Part of what happens inside birds to trigger migration remains a mystery to researchers.

Scott McDougall Shackleton
So we don't know how all of these cues, like increasing in day length, actually lead to changes in the brain and hormones. We have some information, but there's a lot missing. Something inside that bird can keep track of the time of year, so that birds that are down in the southern hemisphere have a sense of what time of year it is and that it's the appropriate time for them to go north.

Menaka Raman-Willms
When you stop to think about bird migration, its pretty incredible.

Take the blackpole warbler, a songbird thats about 14 cm long, thats shorter than your phone, and it weighs about 12 grams, roughly four ping pong balls.

This tiny little black and white bird flies for almost three days nonstop, covering thousands of kilometers, including long stretches over the Atlantic Ocean, to get to their winter homes in the Caribbean and the north part of South America.

To make the journeys, these birds use a combination of instinct, memory and landmarks.

Scott McDougall Shackleton
We know that for the long part of the journey, they have a map and a compass. For the compass, they use the position of the sun, the position of the stars. They can detect magnetic fields. And they use all of these cues in order to know roughly the direction. But then when they get close to their breeding ground, they start using landmarks so they'll recognize coastlines, the rivers, forest edges, all of those landmarks that you or I would use when we're finding our way around a familiar location. And each then, year after year, birds will return, often to within ten or 20 meters of where they nested.

Menaka Raman-Willms
The previous year in Point Pele, one of the birds that was returning to its summer home was the prothonotary warbler. It was the fifth bird we spotted on our quest to see 100.

Unidentified Speaker
What do we got?

Jeremy Bensett
A very bright little yellow bird down there. Much brighter yellow than the yellow warblers that we've seen. A few of this is an endangered species in Canada. This is called prothonotary warbler. This wouldn't be able to survive in the winter here because, because it's small and has a thin beak and eats flies. And this is one of the only spots in the country where this bird breeds.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Habitat loss is causing an increase in the number of endangered bird species like the prothonotary warbler. Deforestation, agriculture, pesticides, logging and other developments that make life easier for humans are making it harder for the birds.

And this is happening to them in both their breeding grounds in Canada and their overwinter homes in the south.

These changes affect some types of birds more than others.

In Canada, nearly 60% of grassland birds have disappeared since 1970.

And weve also lost a huge amount of another type of bird called aerial insectivores, meaning they primarily eat flying bugs.

Point pelee is such an important piece of land for migration because it has multiple habitats in a small geographic region, there are forests, shorelines, marshes and meadows, and some that you can't really find anywhere else in Canada.

It's so far south that if you look at it on a map, it's on par with northern California.

Jeremy Bensett
Yeah, this is a rare habitat, even for southern Ontario. It certainly feels kind of neotropical, like you can imagine when it gets hot and humid in, like July here, and the leaves are completely out on the trees, like you feel like you're in Florida.

Menaka Raman-Willms
We started our search for 100 species in some of these leafy forested areas of point pelee.

Jeremy Bensett
Yeah, that common grackle over there. So that's like one of your typical, like, blackbirds that would be at your bird feeders.

Menaka Raman-Willms
That was my first bird through the binoculars. Cool.

Unidentified Speaker
It's got.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Oh, yeah, it's got, like, kind of a blue. A blue head, actually. I can see it.

Jeremy Bensett
Yeah, they are really nice looking. You get the light on them and all kinds of iridescent colors.

So we're looking relatively high into the treetop here, and we're looking for.

So female scarlet tanagers are green colored. They're like yellow green and blend in really, really well, whereas the males are, like scarlet red with black wings on them.

They say, you know, we have red winged blackbirds, and these are the black winged red birds.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Oh, up there. Oh, yeah.

Unidentified Speaker
What is it?

Jeremy Bensett
These are cedar wax wings.

And so these are the birds I was saying were flying over earlier.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Oh, yeah.

Jeremy Bensett
They're doing like a courtship thing, feeding each other.

They're just passing, like one berry back in.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Oh, yeah.

After the forest, we traveled to one of the park's wetlands, where we saw a collection of warblers, including the yellow warbler, the chestnut sided warbler, the black throated blue warbler, and the warbling vireo, which is actually not a warbler.

We also spied some shorebirds and waterfowl, including the american golden plover and a bird with long toes called a sora.

Scott McDougall Shackleton
Yeah.

Jeremy Bensett
And I basically just. Oh, do you hear that one?

So that was asura. They basically are a little chicken shaped kind of thing. They walk around in grassy wetland like this. So that bird's actually extremely close. We can probably get a really brief look at it.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Oh, yeah.

When you're birding, time seems to slow down.

Some birders say the activity is a form of mindfulness, where they're fully present in nature.

Marcus G.
I was just gonna say to me, it's a bit like having a 6th sense being a birder because everybody else is walking along and they're hearing, tweet, tweet, tweet, but you're hearing, oh, that's Baltimore oriole, that's the yellow warbler. And so you're just more aware of your surroundings, your natural surroundings, and it's a cool kind of insight into the natural world that most people just don't have because they're not tuned in. You're kind of tuned into nature, I guess.

Unidentified Speaker
Hey, Marcus, what's our tally now?

Marcus G.
Let's check it out.

50 50.

Unidentified Speaker
Halfway there. Wow, that's awesome.

Menaka Raman-Willms
We'll be right back.

Unidentified Speaker
How about cap'n crunch's crunchberries with breakfast?

Menaka Raman-Willms
Whoa.

Unidentified Speaker
Dad, we're on crunch island.

He's Jean left foot.

Unidentified Speaker
And he stole our crunch.

Unidentified Speaker
Quick, the zip line.

Unidentified Speaker
He's getting away.

Unidentified Speaker
Throw our last crunchberry. No, no one steals my crunchberries.

Unidentified Speaker
I think you mean my crunchberries. Choose your own crunch venture with tapping crunch.

Menaka Raman-Willms
The mark of an impressive birder is someone who can bird by ear, as they say. They can identify a bird just by hearing its call or song.

This skill is hard to develop, but there are some tricks. Some birds names are actually just their calls, like the eastern wood pee wee, that goes.

Others have songs that can be remembered using a mnemonic device, like the song of the white throated sparrow.

To recall it, people use the phrase, oh, sweet Canada, Canada, Canada.

And advanced birders like Jeremy are able to not just identify the songs, but also describe them.

Jeremy Bensett
It's like e ole.

That one there. So that's a wood thrush. That's one that breeds in the woodland here, but also, like, more or less all of these birds. It's a migrant that just arrived recently.

That bird is also species at risk in Ontario and Canada.

Menaka Raman-Willms
In addition to losing their habitat, these creatures are also facing newer threats because of climate change. In our warming planet, the main challenge.

Scott McDougall Shackleton
With climate change is the potential for mismatched timing.

Menaka Raman-Willms
That's bird expert doctor McDougall Shackleton again from Western University.

Scott McDougall Shackleton
Birds that migrate, some of them come back very reliably at certain times of year. We call those calendar birds. Other birds are much more flexible and will migrate very slowly and respond to weather conditions.

Are the leaves coming out yet? Are there insects available? And they're much more flexible about when they migrate.

The birds that are calendar birds are the ones that are going to have more of a risk of mismatch. This is because as springs advance, plants come out sooner, the insects come out sooner. The birds are responding to the old clock, they're the old calendar. And so if they come back, say, on May 2 every year.

May 2 now might be too late. The insects that they need to feed their babies might have already emerged and they may arrive too late in order to breathe.

Menaka Raman-Willms
This mismatch can have severe effects over time.

Scott McDougall Shackleton
When those birds arrive too late, they will usually be able to survive themselves. There might be enough food for them, but they can have nest failures. And so that means they're not producing young and you're going to have a long term population consequence. With fewer of that species.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Food reserves are even more important when you consider that birds are having to expend more energy to migrate during their travels, they deal with more frequent and more severe storms. Because of the changes happening in our climate during migration.

Scott McDougall Shackleton
Storms can interrupt migration. It can throw birds off course. Some species will actually perform a reverse migration in order to avoid storms. Go back south for a day or two and then come back north and affect their timing. And during the breeding season, storms can affect the nest success.

Menaka Raman-Willms
The other thing that can happen is a fallout. Here's how our point Peely guide Jeremy described it.

Jeremy Bensett
If the weather changes, if it shifts quickly to like, cool north wind, or if there's a heavy rainfall in the middle or late part of the night, that's when we experience a real big influx of migrant birds. In the morning time, they'll all find woodland to land.

And that's when we experience what birders call a fallout, because they're literally falling out of the sky from the weather conditions.

Menaka Raman-Willms
How different weather conditions and changes in our climate affect birds is something they study at Western University's advanced facility for Avian Research.

Chris Guglielmo
I'm Chris Guglielmo. I'm a professor of biology here at Western University and I'm also director of the center for Animals on the Move.

Unidentified Speaker
And what are we doing today?

Chris Guglielmo
We are doing a tour of the advanced facility for Avian research at Western University.

Menaka Raman-Willms
This facility has dozens of rooms where researchers can study everything from how birds learn their songs to how different parts of their brains grow and shrink depending on the season.

The most unique testing space is a hypobaric wind tunnel.

Chris Guglielmo
So we're standing on a stairs now overlooking the wind tunnel, so you can get a good picture of the whole layout.

Basically, there's a giant tube that runs the length of the building on the second level. It comes down at each end of the building and then runs back the other way. So that creates a loop called a recirculating wind tunnel.

And on the upper level on the second story is a giant fan so we get this recirculating air around in the loop, and the bird is flying downstairs basically on a treadmill.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Researchers can change atmospheric conditions in the tunnel, things like temperature, humidity, even air pressure, which can simulate the conditions a bird faces when flying at a high altitude. Its actually the only wind tunnel for birds that can do this in the world.

Chris Guglielmo
Weve had a songbird called the black pole warbler fly 28 hours in here nonstop. And this past year, we had shorebird, western sandpiper, flying here for 38 hours without stopping. Now, a wild western sandpiper was actually radio tracked, flying 42 hours minimum nonstop. So they can naturally do those kinds of flights. But when we were able to do that in the wind tunnel, it just totally blew our minds.

So let me go fire it up here.

All right, so let's just set this for.

Menaka Raman-Willms
They also test how things like high intensity winds during storms affect the energy a bird has to use to fly through them.

Chris Guglielmo
And the experiments that were done manipulated the air pressure to simulate either a storm coming in or good weather, and then measured the changes in the restlessness behavior. And in that case, what we found was if we simulated southerly winds, which in the spring mean like a low pressure approaching and temperatures going up, they expressed a lot more migratory restlessness. And if they thought there was a storm coming in, they would start feeding earlier in the daytime, when the lights came on, they would go to the food cup right away, as if they expected, okay, bad weather is coming in.

Menaka Raman-Willms
They've also examined what happens to birds as they face higher temperatures and more humidity during migration.

They found that birds actually burn up more of their muscles and organs to counteract the hotter temperatures during their long flights.

The day we were in point Pele trying to see 100 birds, our guide, Jeremy, said it was a slow day for birds.

Late in the afternoon, after visiting forests, marshes, shorelines, and even the actual point of point pelee, we were only at 73 birds. It didnt feel like we were going to hit.

Marcus G.
Our goal is ambitious, very ambitious.

73 birds. Species is still a lot of species.

I mean, yeah, I'm pretty happy with that.

And the thing is, you don't really, it shouldn't be. But the race anyway, right, about notching up the numbers, if you're just notching them, then you're racing from place to place. You don't even pause to look at the birds and, like, admire their behavior and their plumage and all these things. So, yeah, I mean, it's cool to have a list. I like making a list. But the thing about bird watching is, even if it's a terrible day for birds, you've still had a nice walk in nature. And so it's never like, oh, that was a terrible day, and it hasn't.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Been a terrible day for birds. We've seen lots of birds.

Marcus G.
No, it's been excellent. So no complaints.

Menaka Raman-Willms
And other animals too.

Marcus G.
Yep.

Unidentified Speaker
So what you're saying is it's totally fine if we don't make it to 100 birds?

Marcus G.
Totally fine. Totally fine. I didn't have my.

Honestly, I didn't. It's not a big deal that we.

Menaka Raman-Willms
It's about the journey, right? We've been on a journey.

Marcus G.
Yes, I've heard that said, it's all about the journey.

Jeremy Bensett
It sounds like accepting the key early.

Marcus G.
Sounds like justifying our complete failure. I know, but no, I'm sincerely not disappointed whatsoever.

Menaka Raman-Willms
In a last ditch effort, we left the formal confines of the park and visited another protected spot, Hillman Marsh conservation area.

It was there we saw the trumpeter swan.

Unidentified Speaker
Oh, yeah.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Hey, that's a new species, right?

Unidentified Speaker
Yeah.

Marcus, did you see the swans? Now we count them on our list. What were the swans called again, Jeremy?

Trumpeter swans.

Menaka Raman-Willms
We had been birding for almost 10 hours, but we were finding new species at this marsh.

Marcus G.
I know it's not about the numbers, but we're up to 88 species and. What time is it? 05:05 in the afternoon, 3 hours of daylight left.

Menaka Raman-Willms
We spotted a new species of warbler. The golden winged warbler.

Jeremy Bensett
Doesn't have that like sweet, like whistly voice like all the other warblers. This one's just like.

Menaka Raman-Willms
And even a new shorebird, the killdeer.

Jeremy Bensett
It looks a lot like the semi palmated sandpiper or plover we were looking at before. But the killdeer has two rings. It's a lot larger, stands more upright like that.

Menaka Raman-Willms
We spied a medium sized black and white duck with a golden eye, the lesser Scott.

Okay, we've just added the lesser Scott to the list and now we're at 99.

Unidentified Speaker
I just need one more. Come on.

Marcus G.
Come on, guys. Come on, little birdies.

Menaka Raman-Willms
One more.

Marcus G.
You can do it.

Menaka Raman-Willms
It took almost 12 hours to find that many species, and if bird populations continue to decline, a goal like this might be much more difficult in the future.

We asked doctor Scott McDougall Shackleton of Western University how he felt about the challenges ahead for bird populations when it comes to the pressures of climate change.

Scott McDougall Shackleton
I'm cautiously optimistic. Birds are very charismatic and a lot of people care about them. And so we can use birds as a way to gather public attention to these challenges we're facing. We have a lot of success stories, but there are other birds that aren't doing so well. And so what we need to do is take the success we've had with some groups of birds and now target it to those birds that are most at risk. That's going to include preserving habitat as well and doing everything we can to mitigate the effects of changes in the landscape due to climate change and changes in their food supply.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Our guide, Jeremy, made the task of identifying the final bird, ours. We had to use the skills he'd given us that day to find number 100.

Unidentified Speaker
It's been a long day. We got it.

So Marcus is gonna find the hundredth bird farm.

Marcus G.
What pressure. Too much pressure. I'm a terrible birder. I told you.

Unidentified Speaker
I see. But, like, my problem is that I see a bird, but is that a new bird? I don't know.

Marcus G.
That's the question.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Then we saw more swans, but Marcus noticed that they didn't have black beaks like the trumpeters. They had orange ones.

Unidentified Speaker
Ah, sorry.

Marcus G.
Those are mute swans. We haven't seen them before, so I'm calling 100.

Menaka Raman-Willms
All right, fair.

Can you point out the swan? Where's the swan?

Marcus G.
Behind Jeremy. All the way over there. Over there?

Menaka Raman-Willms
Oh, yeah.

Marcus G.
The kind of swans you see in parks. Boom.

Menaka Raman-Willms
Nice job. We did it.

Marcus G.
We did it.

Menaka Raman-Willms
And unlike the trumpeter swan, whose name comes from its honk, the mute swan isn't actually mute.

It just makes more of a sneeze and snort sound.

That's it for today.

Special thanks to Matt first and the folks at Birds Canada, who shared their research for this episode. If you want to learn more about the different factors that threaten birds and how to address them, you can check out birdscanada.org guide.

A few of the bird sounds you heard today were courtesy of Cornell Lab of Ornithologys, McAuley Library.

And a thank you to Jeremy Bensat for helping us find 100 species of birds. His tour company is called Peely Birding.

Im Manica Rammond Wellms. Kelsey Arnett is our intern. This episode was written and produced by Madeline White. Our other producers are Cheryl Sutherland and Rachel Levy McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Fraynor is our managing editor.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.

Unidentified Speaker
How about cap'n crunch's crunchberries with breakfast?

Whoa, dad, we're on lunch island.

He's on the foot.

Unidentified Speaker
And he stole our crunch.

Unidentified Speaker
Quick. The zip line.

Unidentified Speaker
He's getting away.

Unidentified Speaker
Throw our last crunch berry. No.

No one steals my crunch berries.

Unidentified Speaker
I think you mean my crunchberries. Choose your own crunch venture with tapping crunch.