Latest news with #breedingbirds
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Climate
- The Guardian
How this summer's heatwaves are affecting breeding birds
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, while one heatwave looks like chance, two – in one month – suggests something more serious is going on. This summer's heatwaves across southern Britain and much of continental Europe have had a mixed effect on breeding birds. Warm, sunny days allow them plenty of time to feed and reduce the risk of their chicks dying in the nest because of spells of cold, wet and windy weather. Yet long periods of very hot and dry weather can be equally harmful: baby birds can overheat, and some insect food can be scarce or hard to reach, especially when the ground bakes hard and dry. In the longer term, if summer droughts become the norm, then some species will suffer, while others will benefit by shifting their ranges further north. A seminal 2021 report from the BTO, Climate Change and the UK's Birds, noted that certain groups of birds – notably seabirds and upland specialists – are already being affected negatively by the climate crisis. And while roughly half of our breeding species don't appear to be affected, we need to continue regular surveys of their populations so ensure that we can try to mitigate any harm. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion In the short term, the RSPB has reminded us to regularly refill our bird baths with clean water, as birds need to drink and bathe during hot weather to keep themselves healthy.
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Country diary: The sense of emptiness in these driven-grouse moors stirs a deep melancholy
It's one of my midsummer rituals, if the forecast is right, to climb on to the moorland tops and await sunset. I build in several secondary goals: check if there are lapwings still on eggs in the sheep pasture below the summit (just two); see if there are curlew pairs breeding in the heather (only three). These exercises add to a personal dataset that is 50 years old. While I can confirm that, in all that time, snipes, curlews, lapwings and golden plovers have bred annually, both redshanks and dunlins have long gone and the other quartet is much diminished. As a result, Combs Moss is steeped in melancholy for me. It's not just the loss of breeding waders, but the sense of remarkable emptiness on these driven-grouse places. You stand there in the falling light, gazing across thousands of acres, Manchester twinkling as a child's toytown on the far horizon, and there can be no sign of any wild vertebrate life for minutes on end. Except your own troubled heartbeat. I love this place tenderly. I also lament its deeply arrested condition and, as I settle in for the sunset hour, I ponder how we can terminate legally these bird-killing rituals and create something richer. But my business isn't politics. There are few places more beautiful in our area than Derbyshire's cotton fields at dusk. In this moment, it's the common cotton-grass whose white-flossed heads, unfolding across the rolling moor, actually invoke some landscape in deepest Alabama. In Shetland and Orkney, in fact, people once had the patience and skill to pick, spin and knit this sedge floss into garments. There is a pair of christening socks in the Orkney Museum that is made from what they called 'Lucky Minnie's Oo', oo meaning wool in Shetlandic. Tonight, it flows as salt-white foam settled on a full tide, or even like the crusted snow blanketing this same place during most winters. I love it most where the dusk-tinted hanks of the bog-cotton mingle with the minute, hard, rose-tinged seedheads of the bent grasses. Together they create this enormous glittering sheet whose matrix colour, at last light, is the soft sepia of deep nostalgia. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
