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Climate change may be flipping good Arctic neighborhoods into killing fields for baby birds.
Every year, shorebirds migrate thousands of kilometers from their southern winter refuges to reach Arctic breeding grounds. But what was once a safer region for birds that nest on the ground now has higher risks from predators than nesting in the tropics, says Vojtěch Kubelka, an evolutionary ecologist and ornithologist at Charles University in Prague. With many shorebird populations dwindling, nest success matters more every year.
A longtime fan of shorebirds, Kubelka had heard about regional tests of how predator risk changes by latitude for bird nests. He, however, wanted to go global. Shorebirds make a great group for such a large-scale comparison, he says, because there’s not a lot of variation in how nests look to predators. A feral dog in the United States and a fox in Russia are both creeping up on some variation of a slight depression in the ground.
Danger zone
In the past few decades, the average number of nests attacked in 86 Arctic shorebird populations (pink) swerved up, surpbading even the average predator danger at 17 breeding grounds in the Northern Hemisphere’s tropical zone (tan) and 96 populations in the northern temperate zone (green).
Annual shorebird nest attacks, 1944–2016
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