Chaotic weather and the death of birds
Last Christmas — or was it two Christmases ago? — a fierce cold snap descended on our region, unexpectedly. It took most of us by surprise. Temperatures dropped from the mid 30s (Fahrenheit) to 4F, plummeting before a driving polar wind, all in the course of a day.
Warmer weather came back just as quickly. Yet now fewer little birds showed up at our backyard feeders.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I learned later that they’d frozen to death. Digging for information that had not appeared in any news source I’d seen, I finally learned from scientific sources that there had been a “die off” of birds that year due to the freak Christmas cold snap.
Since I’ve lived in my present home, which has a back patio, I’ve become a desultory bird watcher. I can name some of the more common little birds that arrive to eat the black oil sunflower seeds I throw out on the concrete patio and pour into the feeders: various sparrows, house finches, three or four cardinals. A solitary titmouse almost every day; a chickadee. A few juncos. Occasionally a blue jay — but not so much in the winter.
It’s been a few years now that I’ve been feeding and watching what I call “my patio birds.” In the way of humans, I have “claimed” them as “mine,” when in fact they are their own birds, about which I know almost nothing.
I try to read up on the habits of birds. I go to some of the more popular websites, which I feel I can trust, but often the information I really want cannot be found.
At least I can’t find it:
- Are small birds able to eat frozen sunflower seeds still in their shells? Is it less nutritious?
- Does it make them colder to eat frozen seed?
- Where do birds go when it’s very cold (in the single digits)?
I’ve never seen a single thing about frozen seeds. I have seen various sites explaining where birds go in winter, and how they keep warm, but much of it, as is the case with the Internet, is repetitive; sites clearly having copied from one another, or, perhaps, simply invented — “facts” the writer suspects are true, but nothing backed up by data or field studies. But one site offered an article written by winter bird expert Bernd Heinrich. I’ve read his books, and I trust his information about birds in winter. Wisely, though, Heinrich discussed only a few species — those he knew about, I guess — and so I was still without adequate information for the birds I was seeing.
We have just now pulled out of another cold snap here. This one was more vicious than the last one in that it stayed cold for longer. Couple of weeks. Low temperatues in the single digits. Repeatedly.
But I was ready this time, I thought. Taking to heart the what I learned from Heinrich, I put out sunflower seed several times a day — a lot of it. I put some on the patio, some in the 3 hanging feeders, some under the patio furniture, protected a bit from the wind; some behind a breakfront.
I made sure I replenished it before dark, too. I figured that if little mice were about in the night, they could get the seed from the patio. (Do mice venture out in the single digits? I don’t know.)
I did all I could.
One of the problems where I live is that there is simply not much shelter for animals here in the suburbs.
Since I’ve moved here, I’ve had conifers planted along the northern edge of the property; but they are still young, and fairly small, and the wind is strong and still blows through them. They’re not a good barrier yet. I’ve left my perennial beds from summer unattended, as environmentalists are now advising: my coneflower, milkweed, black-eyed susans, butterfly bushes, their leaves still on, are massed together with their stems and 6 or 8 inches of maple leaves around them all — leaves I would not allow the “lawn care workers” to cart away.
But it’s still not enough. And most birds don’t shelter in leaf litter on the ground, anyway.
I was now putting out seed several times a day, and at first I was heartened. Birds were coming. Quite a few of them. At one point, after temperatures had been stuck in the teens for several days, I counted nearly 50 birds on the patio or at a hanging feeder. It made me happy. I was helping them! A drop to 4 degrees F in the morning, and they still came.
But the next morning it went down to 2 degrees. When I opened the curtains onto the patio, the scene was empty. No birds. Maybe they were sleeping late, I hoped. However, as the morning wore on, and no birds appeared, I could no longer dismiss my fear: that, at 2 degrees, food or no, most of the little birds had died. Maybe all of them.
Now temperatures were rising. The weather was moderating. And the sun was shining. And later that day, a few birds appeared. Maybe 5, 6. They ate a few seeds, then flew away.
It’s been several days now, and it’s not even going down to freezing anymore. Forecasts say it won’t go below freezing for the foreseeable future. But that’s too late for the little birds who died.
Can we protect little birds unused to such cold temperatures in this locale? Birds indigenous to Maine, Quebec, and other northern climes, are acclimated — they are either different species or they have different habits; I don’t know. But for little birds in the latitude where I live, the chaotic weather caused by climate change in recent years seems to be translating into certain winter death for a majority of them.
Yes, this is how nature works. It isn’t the first time in the history of the planet that temperatures have shifted; not the first time there have been mass die-offs. It’s nothing new, they say. And “they” would be right. Except — except this time it’s happening really fast. And this time we humans are entirely to blame.
