Phenology

[natterjack]

No, nothing to do with "feeling your bumps"! As I'm sure many of you will know it's "The science of the relations between climate and periodic biological phenomena, as the migrations and breeding of birds, the flowering and fruiting of plants, etc." thank you Websters.

Is anyone else recording for The UK Phenology Network?

http://www.phenology.org.uk/

I heard my first Chiffchaff today: my 22nd recorded event this year.

The advance of the seasons is pretty clear looking through the range of historical records that they've got online. Many occurances are weeks earlier nowaday in comparison with, say, 50 years ago.

[LeeP]

Hi friend toad,
I recently read that your great tit is in trouble because it is nesting at the same time that it always has while the winter moth caterpillars which the tit needs to feed its chicks are reaching peak abundance much earlier than in the past. Is the great tit doomed? Do you have any additional info on this?


Lee

[natterjack]

Originally Posted by LeeP

I recently read that your great tit is in trouble

They're not doing too badly here at the moment - I can hear two (or more) singing as I type, and compared to many other declining species in the UK, they are still very abundant. I'm no great specialist in this, but it seems that some populations are coping better than others:

"A dearth of winter-moth caterpillars bodes ill for the small European bird Parus major, or great tit. This nonmigratory species—a common, widely studied bird that's similar to North America's chickadees—depends on winter-moth caterpillars to feed its fledglings. A 23-year study of great tits and winter moths at one site in the Netherlands revealed that by 1995, the early caterpillars were hatching about 9 days sooner and developing into moth pupae more quickly than they did in 1973. The birds' egg laying and hatching schedule hadn't changed dramatically, so the fledglings' caterpillar food source was disappearing just when the young birds needed it.

Visser and his colleagues recently conducted a broader analysis of great tits at 23 sites in six European countries. That study showed that some populations have been able to respond to climate change. In Britain, for example, the birds' egg-laying date has shifted earlier, so it now more closely follows the availability of food, Visser and his colleagues report in the Feb. 22 Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B."

That's from a Science News Online article (http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030308/bob9.asp), which itself point to Visser's 2003 study, which is available online as a PDF at: http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/a...lts,1:102024,1

Visser's conclusion seems to be that the UK population is able to cope for now, but may have problems in the future, as others already are.

So the internet is useful (I sometimes doubt it)