Sparrows show increased stress when exposed to more numerous and more severe winter storms, says a Western study that tested the songbirds’ resilience to the effects of climate change.
Sparrows show increased stress when exposed to more numerous and more severe winter storms, says a Western study that tested the songbirds’ resilience to the effects of climate change.
And where a canary in a coal mine once provided an early signal of danger to humans below ground, ‘sparrows in a snowstorm’ might be a harbinger of trouble for other species dealing with frequent extreme-weather events, the researchers say.
The paper recently published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution was co-authored by PhD student Andrea Boyer and Scott MacDougall-Shackleton, director of the Advanced Facility for Avian Research (AFAR) at Western.
Theirs is the first study to simulate, in a controlled setting, the impact of winter storms on birds. “This is one of the few places in the world you can do a study like this,” because of the facility’s unique capacity to mimic different climate conditions, MacDougall-Shackleton said.
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Image via Western University.
