The impact of climate change is not lost on humans, but how are our feathered friends navigating these fluctuations?
"There's this very close relationship between where birds are when on the planet and what's happening with the climate and what's happening with weather, right?" Andrew Farnsworth, a migration ecologist and a visiting scientist at Cornell University, said.
When we look at that relationship, we have to take a look at the weather and climate on a global scale.
"A lot of that connects to what's going on in the arctic, what's going on in the Boreal forests, where there are wildfires, where there are challenges that birds are facing," Farnsworth said.
Bird watchers from a local level notice this, too. Each season we have in Connecticut impacts bird sightings year-round.
"We just see it," Ryan Zipp, owner of The Fat Robin in Hamden, said. "We've been here 30 years, and we just know in those years, when you guys talk about how it's a whatever year, up or down, we see it, the correlation with the bird seed."
Every year, we see certain birds migrate as the nights get longer.
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Like clockwork, some of them head south at the same time each fall. However, some species are starting to move at different times of the year — with the more rapid temperature swings — which seems to be more beneficial in the 21st century so far.
"We do see birds track climate change, obviously some are managing to do it, but the challenge is for those that can't," Farnsworth said.
Climate change also poses a threat to bird habitats. Wildfires and melting glaciers take away their ecosystems.
Bird experts suggest that we should try to help birds in any way that we can, including turning our lights off at night and continuing to keep our bird feeders and bird baths full.
"As humans, we've taken away a lot of their natural resources on all sorts of levels," Zipp said. "This is our way to kind of give back, keep things going for them."
