Millions of birds make their way through the San Francisco Bay Area on the way north to their breeding grounds every spring. Many shorebirds and waterfowl have already left, and now waves of songbirds are passing through. As well-watched as birds are, there are still a lot of things scientists don’t know about migration, including precisely where different species go each summer and winter, and what exactly triggers them to get going. Since so many birds pass through here, the Bay Area is a good place to try and sort out some of the questions, and to try to tackle another: how does climate change affect birds?

The San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, a non-profit science and conservation organization, has been monitoring birds here for 30 years. The information collected through its bird banding program, has helped reveal some of the likely effects of climate change on birds. For example, a paper released last year suggests that climate change is making some species larger.

Another study, yet to be published, finds that in the past two decades, migration has changed for some species, but not always in the same way. Two species, the Swainson’s thrush and yellow warbler, are arriving in the Bay Area earlier in the spring, while the orange-crowned warbler, yellow warbler and Pacific-slope flycatcher are arriving later in the fall. The Wilson’s warbler migrates over a longer period of time in the fall, while in the spring, the orange-crowned warbler migrates over a longer duration, and the Wilson’s warbler and Pacific-slope flycatcher migrate for a shorter duration.

“With anything biological, it’s never as simple as we’d like to think it is,” Gina Barton, who did the study as a grad student at Kansas State University, told me over the phone. She said while her study points to these changes happening, she can’t gauge what kind of effect they’ll have. “It’s really hard to tease apart what’s going on,” she said. “It could be very drastic for populations if the timing of arrival isn’t coinciding with food during migration, for instance,”

If populations of birds do begin to change more drastically, the volunteers and staff at the Bird Observatory will probably notice. They catch and band birds three days a week, all year long. They have hundreds of thousands of records, dating back thirty years.

USFWS Pacific Southwest Region

This California condor, flying near the coast, is one of about 200 condors living in the wild.

Wind is a growing industry in the Tehachapi Mountains in Southern California. Kern County welcomes new wind projects, and Google has gotten in on the action. But some environmentalists say that developers and officials are ignoring the elephant — or, in this case, the enormous bird — in the room.

California condors are beginning to return to the Tehachapis after nearly going extinct in the 1980′s, and birds and wind turbines don’t mix. No California condors have yet had a run-in with a turbine. But they are still endangered — it’s illegal to kill them — and three environmental groups say that Kern County and the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are not properly considering the risks. The Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the BLM today, regarding one wind development in particular. (They have previously sued Kern County over the same project).

An article in Forbes explains.

In the suit filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, the environmental groups asked a judge to issue an injunction to stop construction of North Sky River. They argue that the BLM had violated the federal Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws by failing to adequately consider the impact of the wind farm.

Forbes environment editor Todd Woody has written before about the condor/wind farm controversy. His article from January lays out all the issues.

This isn’t the only case of renewable energy boosters and endangered species clashing. Climate Watch has previously looked at how solar installations affect desert tortoises and risks to the San Joaquin kit fox, also from solar.

By Sam Harnett

Gundi Vigfusson

The Salton Sea, northeast of San Diego, is an important stop on the Pacific Flyway for migrating birds. Millions of birds stop there every year.

Last month the California Supreme Court upheld a water transfer deal that sends billions of gallons of water a year from Imperial County farms to cities in San Diego County. The 2003 deal is the largest agriculture-to-urban water transfer in the history of the United States, and it will have major environmental and economic impacts on the region. One of the areas most dramatically affected will be California’s largest — and in many ways its most notorious — inland body of water: the Salton Sea.

The Salton Sea has a fraught history. It used to be part of the Colorado River Delta, but with the diversion of water the area has become desert. In 1905, a massive flood caused the formation of the current Sea, and during the following decades it became an iconic resort location, drawing fishermen and pleasure seekers from across the country. In the 1970s, the Sea fell from favor. Rising salinity killed all the sport fish, celebrities stopped coming, and the resort developments were abandoned. Today, the only water the Sea receives is agricultural run-off from nearby farms, and without that water, the Sea will disappear in a matter of years.

There are two major concerns if the Salton Sea dries up. The first is a public health issue. The Sea currently covers 376 square miles of toxic seabed. Over the last 100 years, the sand has absorbed all the pollutants from the agricultural run-off of nearby farms. Because of the high salt content, the toxic dust can become airborne with a breeze of just five-to-ten miles per hour. The Sea reaches a maximum depth of 50 feet, so a foot of elevation loss translates to miles of exposed seabed. Imperial County already has violent dust storms and health officials worry that the increased exposure of salt dust will further deteriorate air quality.

The second concern is ecological. While tourists no longer flock there, the Sea is still a popular stop for birds — one of the few remaining waterways in Southern California for migratory birds on the Central, Atlantic and Pacific flyways. The others have dried up as water has been diverted for agricultural and urban uses. The Audubon Society says that more than 400 different species, adding up to millions of birds, stop over at the Salton Sea each year. Michael Cohen, a senior research associate at the Pacific Institute, says without the sea there will be massive bird die-offs and possibly extinctions.

The water transfers have shortened the timeline for the Sea’s decline. As part of a 2003 deal, the Sea will receive “mitigation water” until 2018, to offset diversions to San Diego County. Even with this water, the Sea is losing almost a foot of depth a year. Once that water stops flowing, the Sea will change dramatically. Cohen describes it as “falling off a cliff.” His dire predictions for the Sea’s future appear in a 2006 report he drew up for the Pacific Institute.

While the mitigation water still flows, the state was supposed to come up with a plan to prevent the ecological and public health disasters. They drafted a full restoration plan in 2003 with a price tag of about nine billion dollars. When the recession hit, the plan was shelved entirely. Before the mitigation water runs out, local groups are fighting to establish smaller projects that will mitigate the impending calamity.

In the south, the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) wants to set up 750 acres of wetlands around Red Hill Marina. The shore has receded markedly over the last decade, and the toxic white seabed now surrounds the entire hill. To pay for the project, the district wants to end the mitigation water four years ahead of schedule. Currently, the district compensates farmers who have had to fallow their fields because the mitigation water has been sent to the Sea instead of their crops. If they don’t have to pay the farmers, the district thinks it can raise $60-70 million for restoration projects.

Local environmental groups in the north have a completely different agenda. Debi Livesay works for the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, who own miles of coast around the north of the Sea. She has managed to set up 65 acres of wetlands and bird habitat with only limited help from the state. The Torres Martinez Tribe has plans to expand the project, but Livesay says they won’t be able to move forward without the time buffer afforded by the mitigation water.

Livesay says that ending the mitigation water early would be a devastating blow to her projects and one more chapter in the Salton Sea’s tumultuous restoration story. Livesay claims that the Torrez Martinez Native Americans were left completely out of the loop on the original water transfer deal. Afterward, she says the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) used a technical loophole to prevent the tribe from getting state restoration funds. Officials want the tribe to complete a state environmental report, but because the tribe is a sovereign entity it can only complete a federal environmental report, which DFG won’t accept. Livesay says this kind of frustrating roadblock has been the norm in the fight to keep the Sea from itself sliding toward environmental disaster. I was unable to reach anyone at the Department of Fish and Game who could comment on Livesay’s statements in time for this story.

The Torres Martinez Tribe and IID disagree on the water mitigation schedule, but they agree on one thing: the only way to save the Sea is for the state or federal government to enact a large-scale restoration program. In the meantime, the Sea continues to shrink.

Listen to my radio story about the Salton Sea Monday morning on The California Report.

Molly Samuel

Birds like the Black Oystercatcher that live along the shoreline are threatened by rising sea levels.

More than one hundred species of California’s birds are vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Scientists at the California Department of Fish and Game and PRBO Conservation Science examined nearly 400 species and subspecies for a study, released today. Of those, 128 are at risk.

San Francisco Bay is home to the majority of the most vulnerable birds. “That’s primarily because of sea level rise and also because there are already so many imperiled species that use that habitat in the bay,” says Tom Gardali, an ecologist is PRBO Conservation Science.

Those species include the endangered California Clapper Rail and three song sparrows found only in the Bay Area. “With sea level rise, the habitat that exists could be underwater if there’s no place for it to grow into because of development,” says Gardali. Birds that inhabit rocky coastline could also be at risk for the same reason, including the Black Oystercatcher, Common Murre, and Pigeon Guillemot.

Twenty-one of the state’s 29 threatened and endangered species are on the list. “It is more than likely that some of these species are already feeling the effects of climate change,” he says. “Massive changes to the ocean foods web could very well be a direct effect of climate change, as well as prolonged droughts or droughts more frequently.”

Garbali says the California Department of Fish and Game will use the date to update their list of species of special concern, which hasn’t included climate change effects to date. The agency could use also the information in revising the California Wildlife Action Plan. “State and federal agencies will consider the threat of climate change. That will become business as usual. It will have to be.”

“I think you could see this study as an opportunity to start planning now and we have time to make a difference for California’s biodiversity,” says Gardali.

PRBO Conservation Science

Anna's Humminbird

Maybe… if you’re a bird.  

You may have heard that climate change is affecting the size of habitats, but did you know that it may also be changing the size of organisms themselves?

A new study finds that songbirds in central California are getting bigger.

The report, published this month in the journal Global Change Biology, looked at the wingspan and weight of thousands of small birds in the region, such as finches, robins, swallows and hummingbirds, and found that over the last 30 years size has increased from .02 percent to .1 percent annually.

Researchers at PRBO Conservation Science looked at data for 73 species, combing 40 years of data from Point Reyes National Seashore and nearly 30 years of data from Milpitas.

What’s particularly interesting about the study, say authors, is that previous studies from other places in the world have found the size of organisms to be shrinking — not growing. That phenomena has been attributed to warming temperatures.

Authors of this study propose that the increases they found in central California’s birds could be attributed to more variation in the climate and harsher weather conditions.

There’s more on the study at the San Jose Mercury News and The Bay Citizen.

Stellar's Jay. Photo: National Park Service

Climate change has California’s birds on the move, but not in the usual direction or at the same pace, a new study has found.  Research suggests that warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will cause bird species distributions to shift independently, resulting in new bird “communities” appearing in up to half the state.

In some cases, these new communities will create combinations of birds that have never existed before, a situation that could disrupt the delicate balance of species interactions with potentially unanticipated consequences for whole ecosystems, the report authors concluded.

One of the co-authors, Stanford biologist Terry Root, told Climate Watch: “This will not be just a few species in a few locations–this tearing apart of communities could be quite extensive across California.”

Root was among  researchers from Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, PRBO Conservation Science, the University of California-Santa Cruz, and the Klamath Bird Observatory, who collaborated on the study.  They used bird survey data and climate model projections for California to map current and future bird distributions for 70 species.  Many species often found together, such as acorn woodpeckers and western bluebirds, are projected to shift and adapt in different ways, resulting in these new assemblages.

PBRO has posted interactive maps of the future projections for individual species distributions on its Climate Change, Birds, and Conservation website, in the section called “Where will the birds be?“.

The study authors, including Terry Root of Stanford and Diana Stralberg and John Wiens of PRBO, write that the emergence of new bird communities in the coming decades present enormous conservation and management challenges.  They assert that rapidly changing habitats and ecological communities are going to require new approaches to conservation and management. “As new combinations of species interact, some species will face new competition and/or predation pressures, while others may be released from previous biotic interactions,” they wrote. “Managers and conservationists will be faced with difficult choices about how, where, and on which species to prioritize their efforts and investments.”

Root pointed to experience with wolves, coyotes and foxes, in which wildlife managers tried to control one,  only to see unexpected spikes in the population of another: “Here is a community of only 3 canines to which we purposely forced changes, and we had two big surprises.  Now we are talking about 70 species of birds shifting without any control of the force or the species being changed.  I guarantee there will be a lot of surprises.”

The yellow-billed magpie could lose 75% of its range. Photo by Mike Bergin

The hardiest of volunteers are winding up the Audubon Society’s Great Backyard Bird Count today. Consistent rain has made it a challenge throughout much of California (don’t get me wrong–you won’t see me complaining about rain at this point).

These bird counts are more than just feel-good exercises in pubic education. The data is useful in serious research,  like the Society’s recent stunning report on the likely effects of climate change on bird populations. The study, released last week, combined climate models with 40 years of data from Aububon’s Christmas Bird Count, to paint a grim picture for California’s birds.

The part of the study that focused on California warned that a third of the state’s native bird populations could see their ranges shrink substantially as the planet warms. According to the report:

“These reductions will be part of massive range shifts to all of the state’s bird species caused wholly or in part by the effects of climate change.”

Gary Langham, who co-authored the California study, says it should provide a wake-up call, and not just for those crafting policy to cut greenhouse gas emissions: “It’s also a tool for land managers and conservation groups and others to look at the landscape and understand where their conservation investments would be most wisely spent.”

Langham and his co-author, William B. Monahan note that this is more than a projection:

“Climate change is already pushing species globally poleward and higher in  elevation. In California, directional changes in climate during the 20th century were substantial.”

That squares with the observations of local birdwatchers. Tom Rusert, who founded the non-profit Sonoma Birding, says he’s seen a huge influx of American robins (something that might be a welcome sight in my hometown of Syracuse, NY, right about now). Rusert says his Sonoma Valley Christmas Bird Count drew 150 volunteers last year.

Thanks to nature sound recordists Martyn Stewart of Naturesound and Bernie Krause of Wild Sanctuary for providing bird calls for last week’s radio story. The magpie photo comes to us by way of 10,000 Birds.