Podcast Draft - Cons 210

Climate change has had a significant impact on bird migration. The equatorial regions are expanding due to warmer temperatures, which affects the traditional routes and schedules of bird migration. Birds face challenges in adapting to changing environments and finding suitable habitats. They typically migrate from equatorial regions to take advantage of unoccupied breeding habitat. This means that what we think of as North American birds are actually South American birds that breed in North America. The tropics provide a busy environment with abundant food for birds during winter. Hello and welcome to the Future of Feathers. On this podcast, we will be talking about the impacts of climate change on bird migration. Today, we will bring in special guest Michael Miller to dive deeper into the fantastic world of birds. Throughout this episode, we'll uncover how climate change has triggered adjustments in the traditional routes and schedules of bird migration. We'll explore the challenges that birds face in adapting to changing environments, finding suitable habitats, and securing essential resources along their arduous journeys. Thanks for being with us today, Michael. Our first question is, is there a history of bird migration changing over the past few decades? In the past 40 or 50 years, as climate change is advancing, we're seeing the equatorial regions increase. The tropical regions, not physically, but climate, are increasing. Warmer temperatures are creeping further north. With warmer temperatures, the atmosphere energy increased by those temperatures, you're seeing a lot bigger changes in weather predictability. The weather is becoming less and less predictable. Birds have a choice of, or birds are faced with a problem of, what do they do to come back from the tropics? Now, a lot of people think about birds migrating as, oh, let's go to a summer, a warmer climate. What's actually happening is, birds typically evolved in the equatorial regions and then moved either north in the northern hemisphere or south in the southern hemisphere to take advantage of unoccupied breeding habitat. So, what we visualize as North American birds, for example, are actually South American birds that breed in North America. So, it's kind of a different frame shift to think about what migration is. They're taking advantage of, robins and other North American birds that you might be familiar with, are taking advantage of a habitat that's, you know, in the tropics where they're wintering, it's quite busy. There's a lot of birds down there and a lot of food availability.