I thought I would post this message I received for which is near and dear to
my heart.





Disaster at sea: global warming hits UK birds


By Michael McCarthy Environment Editor


30 July 2004

Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed to breed this summer
in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to
global warming.

The massive unprecedented collapse of nesting attempts by several seabird
species in Orkney and Shetland is likely to prove the first major impact of
climate change on Britain.

In what could be a sub-plot from the recent disaster movie, The Day After
Tomorrow, a rise in sea temperature is believed to have led to the
mysterious disappearance of a key part of the marine food chain - the
sandeel, the small fish whose great teeming shoals have hitherto sustained
larger fish, marine mammals and seabirds in their millions.

In Orkney and Shetland, the sandeel stocks have been shrinking for several
years, and this summer they have disappeared: the result for seabirds has
been mass starvation. The figures for breeding failure, for Shetland in
particular, almost defy belief.

More than 172,000 breeding pairs of guillemots were recorded in the islands
in the last national census, Seabird 2000, whose results were published this
year; this summer the birds have produced almost no young, according to
Peter Ellis, Shetland area manager for the Royal Society for the Protection
of Birds (RSPB).

Martin Heubeck of Aberdeen University, who has monitored Shetland seabirds
for 30 years, said: "The breeding failure of the guillemots is unprecedented
in Europe." More than 6,800 pairs of great skuas were recorded in Shetland
in the same census; this year they have produced a handful of chicks -
perhaps fewer than 10 - while the arctic skuas (1,120 pairs in the census)
have failed to produce any surviving young.

The 24,000 pairs of arctic terns, and the 16,700 pairs of Shetland
kittiwakes - small gulls - have "probably suffered complete failure", said
Mr Ellis.

In Orkney the picture is very similar, although detailed figures are not yet
available. "It looks very bad," said the RSPB's warden on Orkney mainland,
Andy Knight. "Very few of the birds have raised any chicks at all."

The counting and monitoring is still going on and the figures are by no
means complete: it is likely that puffins, for example, will also have
suffered massive breeding failure but because they nest deep in burrows,
this is not immediately obvious.

But the astonishing scale of what has taken place is already clear - and the
link to climate change is being openly made by scientists. It is believed
that the microscopic plankton on which tiny sandeel larvae feed are moving
northwards as the sea water warms, leaving the baby fish with nothing to
feed on.

This is being seen in the North Sea in particular, where the water
temperature has risen by 2C in the past 20 years, and where the whole
ecosystem is thought to be undergoing a "regime shift", or a fundamental
alteration in the interaction of its component species. "Think of the North
Sea as an engine, and plankton as the fuel driving it," said Euan Dunn of
the RSPB, one of the world's leading experts on the interaction of fish and
seabirds. "The fuel mix has changed so radically in the past 20 years, as a
result of climate change, that the whole engine is now spluttering and
starting to malfunction. All of the animals in the food web above the
plankton, first the sandeels, then the larger fish like cod, and ultimately
the seabirds, are starting to be affected."

Research last year clearly showed that the higher the temperature, the less
sandeels could maintain their population level, said Dr Dunn. "The young
sandeels are simply not surviving."

Although over-fishing of sandeels has caused breeding failures in the past,
the present situation could not be blamed on fishing, he said. The Shetland
sandeel fishery was catching so few fish that it was closed as a
precautionary measure earlier this year. "Climate change is a far more
likely explanation."

The spectacular seabird populations of the Northern Isles have a double
importance. They are of great value scientifically, holding, for example,
the world's biggest populations of great skuas. And they are of enormous
value to Orkney and Shetland tourism, being the principal draw for many
visitors. The national and international significance of what has happened
is only just beginning to dawn on the wider political and scientific
community, but some leading figures are already taking it on board.

"This is an incredible event," said Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the
Earth. "The catastrophe [of these] seabirds is just a foretaste of what lies
ahead.

"It shows that climate change is happening now, [with] devastating
consequences here in Britain, and it shows that reducing the pollution
causing changes to the earth's climate should now be the global number one
political priority."





The composer of the e-mail went on to add:



Add to the above that we have a Snowy Owl summering in Indiana, an extremely
rare occurence that causes one to ponder why.



Additionally, another Hoosier birder wrote the following which is also

disconcerting:



I found this information to be very interesting but alarming.

I just returned from a two week pelagic trip in the Bering Sea and
throughout the entire region a complete breeding failure of murres seems to
have occurred.

We saw tens of thousands of Common and Thick-billed Murres sitting on their
nesting cliffs but saw no chicks or eggs or other signs of breeding. There
were a few downy gull chicks around but that was it. With puffins and cavity
nesters it was difficult to assess the breeding situation. No one seemed to
have an explanation other than lack of food. Long-lived birds will forego
breeding in order to save themselves if they sense a food shortage.





Rooy

Nesting somewhere in Redmond