We like birds and always have a special place in our essay series for good news about their future. A recent article in Acta Oecologica deals with bird diversity in China and the news could not be better, particularly given the results from three other recent studies from China that find that find that plant productivity—a primary determinent of species richness of China’s birds—is on the rise, quite probabily a result of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

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We hear over and over that climate change is now so rapid that ecosystems all over the world are in peril as they attempt to cope with changes to the environment. This view of “delicate” ecosystems is at odds with the reality of the long climate history of the Earth. The climate has warmed in the past, cooled in the past, and many of these changes were quite rapid. Delicate ecosystems would have disappeared long ago and the most robust systems would have survived.

Birds are particular well-suited to move as conditions change. Somewhere deep in their DNA is a memory of changes in the past and how to cope with those changes. Four articles have appeared recently reminding us that birds are fully capable of responding to change in climate.

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In recognition of the recent discovery of the world’s largest beaver dam, we take a look into the activities of past beavers to see what they may be able to tell us about previous climate changes, and we speculate on the impacts that on-going climate changes may be having on the likes and dislikes of current beavers.

World’s largest beaver dam in found in Northern Alberta, Canada.

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Last week, we reported on a truly rare bird—that is, a story in which “global warming” was linked to something good happening to a “good” species, in that case, the grey whale. This week, we have found another rare bird, literally. We report on a findings which suggest that global warming is benefitting another iconic, beloved species, the Trumpeter swan. Maybe there is a growing trend here.

Since it is apparently acceptable practice for Science magazine to accompany an article extolling the evils of anthropogenic climate change (and the need to take action) with an picture of a polar bear (or two) stranded on an ice floe (even though polar bears were not mentioned in the article), perhaps we’ll accompany all of our articles with a photo of a thriving Trumpeter swan. After all, what’s good the goose (or, er, swan)…

Trumpeter swans thriving in a world of enriched CO2.

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Here is the question of the day – who is Kevin VanDam (KVD)? Have a look at the picture below and now think about the question. Come on … admit it to the world – you have watched bass fishing on ESPN stations and you know that KVD is one of the world’s best bass fishermen. KVD has won the Bassmaster Classic three times (2001, 2005, and 2010) and many would argue KVD is simply the greatest bass fishermen who has ever lived. Leading pro bass fishermen are well paid (KVD won $500,000 for the 2010 Bassmaster Classic alone), they are well-sponsored, they have their own TV shows, iPhone apps, and video games, and they endorse countless products in the bassmaster line. Top anglers are superstars in their sport, and if you haven’t heard, pro bass fishing will be the next NASCAR (time will tell). The stuff is on TV all the time, and if you want to see KVD in action (and 1,000s show up for the pro events), there are events all over the USA – get into the sport and follow the women’s tour and junior’s tour as well! If KVD can win millions, why can’t you?

World Champion Kevin VanDam and a couple of live, freshly-caught largemouth bass
(Micropterus salmoides)

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There is an interesting (of course!) new post up over at MasterResource.org taking a closer look at the Audubon Society’s latest pronouncement about birds and climate change. Here it the abstract:

On Tuesday, the National Audubon Society released a report “Birds and Climate Change” which interpreted an average northern shift of the over-wintering range of a large collection of North American bird species over the course of the past 40 years or so. Audubon decided that this range shift was due, in part, to “global warming.” Therefore, it was bad and action must be taken to avert it:

It is the complete picture of widespread movement and the failure of some species to move at all that illustrate the impacts of climate change on birds. They are sending us a powerful signal that we need to 1) take policy action to curb climate change and its impacts, and 2) help wildlife and ecosystems adapt to unavoidable habitat changes, even as we work to curb climate change itself.

What the Audubon Society failed to mention

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While having coffee and reading through the paper on Sunday morning, I came across an AP article about the recent sighting of a LBB (little brown bird in birder’s parlance) in southern Texas. It turns out that everyone was atwitter that the LBB was actually a pine flycatcher—a species which usually inhabits that high elevation mountains of Mexico and Guatemala much further to the south and which had never before been documented in the United States.

I kept reading waiting for the explantion that was sure to come—that “global warming” was likely responsible for the pine flycatcher’s visit as now the climate of the low Texas scrubland was on its way to becoming a possible suitable habitat. But, as I continued to read about the large numbers of bird watchers who had flocked to the area from miles around who could barely contain their enthusiasm, I soon realized that the requisite “blame it on global warming” content was absent.

Then it dawned on me why…this was a story in which people were happy about seeing a cute animal species farther north than it is usually found!

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The Interior Department just announced its decision to list the polar bear as “threatened” under the U.S Endangered Species Act (ESA). The justification behind the decision is that polar bears are highly dependent on sea ice in the Arctic for their livelihood—hunting, mating, birthing, family rearing, etc.—and thus if sea ice declines, so will the overall health of the species. While this may, in fact, be true in some sense, it also gives short-shrift to the bears adaptive abilities, which must be large, given that they survived the previous interglacial warm period as well as an extended period of warmer-than-present conditions in the Arctic (which undoubtedly were associated with reduced sea ice levels) about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago (give or take a thousand years) (see here fore example). If the bears fare worse this time around, it will mostly likely be because their natural adaptive response may run up against a human roadblock in the form of habitat disruption or other types of difficulties that an increased human presence may pose to the adapting bears. It seems that this is what the intent of the ESA is aimed at tempering, not trying to alter the climate—precisely how the Act should have be applied, despite all the criticism surrounding the decision.

All this renewed attention to polar bears has piqued our interest in just how the bears have been faring recently. Al Gore made movie stars out of drowning bears in his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth with an animation sequence depicting a small patch of floating ice disintegrating under a struggling polar bear until it was left swimming alone in a vast expanse of open ocean. One couldn’t help to get a little teary-eyed at the notion.

And as the public just can’t get enough of cute, cuddly, slightly aggressive movie stars who are a little down on their luck, the paparazzi are never too far behind to document their each and every move. Pictures of Paris Hilton partaking in every activity imaginable abound and Britney can’t even pull out of a parking lot without running over a photographer’s foot. So where are all the pictures of drowned and drowning polar bears?

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One of the most well-known and beloved harbingers of spring is the appearance of our feathered friend, the red-breasted robin. And as is the case with virtually every other cute species, it is the subject of climate change speculation from time to time. But in the robin’s case, it doesn’t surround global warming pushing the robin to extinction. Quite the contrary, global warming is expanding the robin’s range into never-before-seen-territory.

How is this bad news, you may wonder? Well the creative minds behind the global-warming-makes-all-things-worse mantra must have been working overtime, but finally, they did manage to come with a good one—the appearance of robins in high northerly latitudes is a sign the global warming is impinging upon the Earth’s sacred Arctic regions, and robbing them of their uniqueness. Case and point, there is no Eskimo word for ‘robin.’

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In the history of global warming scare stories, the 2003 European heat wave was a landmark event—it was the first time that a rash of human deaths were specifically linked to global warming. Many of you probably recall that a widespread exceptionally hot and dry spell hit Western Europe in August, 2003. Depending on how you count the bodies, up to 35,000 people suffered premature death during this heat wave with the lions-share occurring in France, which happened to be heat wave ground zero. Subsequent research demonstrated that this kind of extreme heat event must surely have been caused by increased greenhouse gas levels (Schår et al., 2004), despite the fact that, when examined from a global perspective, this heat wave was very Euro-centric (Chase et al., 2006), and the last time we checked a map, western Europe doesn’t cover much of the globe (which of course is the reason for centuries of European colonialism).

Well, we bet you didn’t know that there was a very comparable heat wave in France in summer, 2006. Why no headlines about global warming’s increasing death toll? In the category of “all the news that’s apparently not fit to print,” you guessed it, many fewer people died. The 2006 heat wave is the subject of a recent paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology by a group of French researchers led by A. Fouillet entitled, “Has the impact of heat waves on mortality changed in France since the European heat wave of summer 2003? A study of the 2006 heat wave.”

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