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Songbird
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Climate change presents a mismatch for songbirds’ breeding season

Sometimes it seems like climate change is an abstract concept — yet for birds, it's getting increasingly real. You can share articles like this and talk about how transitioning to compatible renewables is more important than ever, for the birds — and for others.

Spring is the sweet spot for breeding songbirds in California’s Central Valley — not too hot, not too wet. But climate change models indicate the region will experience more rainfall during the breeding season, and days of extreme heat are expected to increase. Both changes threaten the reproductive success of songbirds, according to a study from the University of California, Davis…

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Solar
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The science of solar-pollinator habitat: a fact sheet

Ground-mounted solar is expected to cover 8-10 million acres as part of our collective effort to transition away from fossil fuels and significantly bring climate change into check. Pollinator-friendly solar could play an important role in biodiversity and agricultural efforts.

Land trusts and community groups can help their communities understand how the design, implementation, and management of solar fields can work to enhance biodiversity and pollinators as well as farming and ranching. In this case, a recent fact sheet by the AgriSolar Clearinghouse provides useful information share.

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Bison
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Climate change threatens the Great Plains, but bison may hold a key to resilience

Partnerships between tribal nations, land trusts, and universities are on the rise related to prairie management, biodiversity, and slowing down (and/or adapting to) climate change. This article touches on many of those concepts, including bison and cattle management.

“The 8,600-acre Konza Prairie Biological Station where Kansas State conducts its bison research lies in the Flint Hills, North America’s biggest remaining stretch of tallgrass prairie.

Once one of North America’s major ecosystems — covering large swaths of the Great Plains from what is today central Texas to south-central Canada — settlers and their descendants destroyed more than 95% of the continent’s tallgrass prairie for cropland and other development. Tallgrass in the Flint Hills escaped the plow only because the region’s shallow soil and rocky layers made farming less practicable there…

Bison act and eat differently than cattle do, though biologists say not all the differences are clear yet. Few studies compare these two bovine herbivores side by side.

Still, a few differences jump out. The bigger species not only eats more grass, it also spends less time along streams than cattle do and more time on hilltops…”

Cattle may not boost plant biodiversity on the prairie as much as bison do, but The Nature Conservancy thinks it’s possible to manage them in ways that support healthier grassland.

They are working with a Flint Hills cattle rancher near Strong City in Kansas, along with Kansas State scientists, to see how fitting a herd with GPS collars might help….

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Blackbird
iStock

Biodiversity safeguards bird communities under a changing climate

A new study shows that North American bird communities containing functionally diverse species have changed less under climate change during the past 50 years than functionally simple communities.

Community-level diversity works as a buffer against negative climate change impacts, especially during winter, i.e the season that has shown strongest climatic warming across the Northern Hemisphere.

On the other hand, biodiversity played a smaller role during the breeding season. Indeed, earlier studies have shown that bird communities change faster during winter than summer, which explains this pattern…

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Cardinals
Pixabay

Climate change, habitat loss (and, yes, even cats) pose a greater threat to birds than windmills

This piece was written in consultation with Dr. Brian Weeks, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. Weeks is an evolutionary ecologist who studies how bird species and communities have responded to environmental change.

Research quantifying the full scale of wind turbine activity’s impact upon birds both through their migratory patterns and killed by collision with wind turbines is a matter of current scientific studies. It is important to quantify these impacts, but it is also important to acknowledge that these impacts are certainly negligible compared to other drivers of bird mortality.

The number of birds killed by wind turbine collisions per year is estimated to be between 150,000 and 500,000, but when you put this number in perspective, it pales in comparison to other causes of bird mortality…

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3-billions-birds-lost

Nearly 3 billion birds gone

Watch this a short video by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology about findings on North America’s steep bird declines.

The first-ever comprehensive assessment of net population changes in the U.S. and Canada reveals across-the-board declines that scientists call “staggering.” All told, the North American bird population is down by 2.9 billion breeding adults, with devastating losses among birds in every biome. Forests alone have lost 1 billion birds. Grassland bird populations collectively have declined by 53%, or another 720 million birds.

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Bird
Dopeyden / Getty Images stock

Just hearing or seeing birds can boost our mental health, new report suggests

Birds can be a catalyst for climate action. Renewable energy is going to be critical for bird survival; we can help people understand the importance by connecting to what they care about.

“Our main finding is that there is a time-lasting association between seeing or hearing birds and improved mental well-being,” said the study’s lead author, Ryan Hammoud, a PhD candidate and a research assistant at the institute of psychiatry and psychology and neuroscience at King’s College London…

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Bee
Getty Images

Climate change is ratcheting up the pressure on bees

UC Davis notes the impact of climate change on domesticated and native bees. Researchers are also working to understand how soil pesticides affect ground-nesting wild bees, which represent over 70% of the U.S. native bee population.

Drought conditions in the western U.S. in 2021 dried up bee forage — the floral nectar and pollen that bees need to produce honey and stay healthy. And extreme rain in the Northeast limited the hours that bees could fly for forage.

In both cases, managed colonies — hives that humans keep for honey production or commercial pollination – were starving…

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Bees Nest
Holly Holt, PhD/Penn State

Nests are bee nurseries

Check out this interesting research from Penn State about found or created bee nests.

Female bees build nests to protect their offspring from bad weather, predators, parasites and disease. Bees nest in cavities that they either find or create. Each of the 4,000 bee species found in North America has a unique life history and nesting preferences. Most North American bee species (>70%) nest underground. Ground nesting bees dig tunnels or look for abandoned holes made by other animals. Other bee species prefer to nest aboveground. Females look for hollow twigs, chew tunnels in dead logs or take advantage of preexisting burrows left by wood-boring beetles. Some species search for naturally occurring crevices in stones and trees and will even occupy pinecones or empty snail shells!

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Ground Nesting Bee
StGrafix/Shutterstock

A common soil pesticide cut wild bee reproduction by 89% – here’s why scientists are worried

It's important to be aware that, for some species, soils with pesticides are threatening extinction. "Protecting honeybees from pesticides is already difficult. For wild bees which forage and nest among a wide variety of crops worldwide, it may be impossible."

When you think of bees, a hive humming with activity probably comes to mind. But most of the world’s 20,000 bee species don’t call a hive home. These wild species lead solitary lives instead, and around 70% of them build nests underground where they raise their offspring on the nectar they gather from flowers.

Incredibly, almost all scientific understanding of how pesticides affect bees has came from testing domesticated honeybees, and, more recently, bumblebees. That’s largely because these species tend to be easier to work with in lab conditions. How non-social bees cope with these chemicals is largely understudied, despite them making up the vast majority of bee species worldwide.

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