Local Garden Society Meets to Discuss Effects of Climate Change on Birds

Chicago’s Northtown Garden Society hosted Director of the Chicago Bird Alliance Matthew Igleski to present “How Climate Change Affects Bird Populations.” With a masters in conservation biology, Igleski’s presentation was inspired by and based on the National Audubon Society’s 2019 report titled “Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink.” 

About 40 people attended the Feb. 6 event in the Warren Park Fieldhouse, approximately 1.6 miles northeast of Loyola’s Lake Shore Campus. Attendees included representatives and members of the garden society and community members. Attendees mingled around the room with beverages and snacks before the meeting commenced.

The Chicago Bird Alliance is the local chapter of the National Audubon Society, according to Igkleski.

In the Audubuon’s report, scientists from the Audubon Society compiled 140 million observations of today’s individual locations of 604 North American bird species — also known as their “range” — and applied climate models to predict how each species’ range would shift.

“All the modeling work Audubon did gives us the ability to tell these stories through presentations,” Igleski said in an interview with The Phoenix.

Before he began, Igleski opened the room up to general questions and spent the first 10 minutes of the event thoroughly explaining the answer to the attendees’ most common question — what’s going on with bird flu?

Avian influenza A virus is spreading across the world via wild birds, infecting U.S. poultry, dairy cows and even humans in rare cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The virus is also forcing farmers to slaughter hundreds of chickens a month, limiting supply and driving up prices in stores, The Associated Press reported.

Igleski said birds migrate north in big congregations at this time of year, increasing chances of the flu spreading. The virus itself is not the problem, but the strains are, which are very rarely spread among land birds — instead primarily carried by large migratory congregations and water fowl. Many migratory birds travel in February and early March, according to the Forest Preserve District.

Igleski eventually commenced the presentation by giving an explanation of the drivers of climate change, including the use of nonrenewable energy sources like fossil fuels and human activities. He said not to measure climate change by a single day, but over time.

“It’s not what you have on today,” Igleski told the room. “It’s everything in your closet.”

The report has an interactive “warming scenario” model to help visitors of the website predict how different species of birds would fare based on an increase in habitat temperature of 1.5, two and three degrees Celsius.

Warming temperatures have shifted the dates birds lay eggs, which disrupts the timing between resources being readily available for birds and their arrival, according to Igleski. The earliest seasonal movements of birds across the Gulf of Mexico occurred earlier over time, according to the National Library of Medicine.

“When it gets warm so early the insects peak before babies hatch, which could eventually get to a point where it’s so separated that the birds won’t be able to feed their young,” Igleski said. 

2.9 billion birds have died since 1970, which equates to one in four birds, according to the NAS. Igleski said though other factors like feral cats and window collisions have contributed to the birds’ deaths, climate change is the biggest factor.

Igleski said a lot of the policy and advocacy work the CBA does relates to window collisions, which he said is a big conservation issue in urban areas. He said they work with the Chicago Ornithological Society and Chicago Bird Collision Monitors. Employees of the organizations collect birds which have collided with windows and take them to rehabbers.

Igleski said he thinks young people should aid the bird conservation effort by petitioning their local government.

“A lot of the time, people want to go straight to the top, but there’s a lot of things local government can do to make things better,” Igleski said.

The garden society hosts meetings the first Thursday of each month, according to Chairman Eva Mannaberg. She said next month they’ll host a speaker who will talk about a “refugee garden” being set up in Chicago.

“We call ourselves the garden society, but we do all kinds of nature-related things,” Mannaberg said.

The Rev. Stephen Mitten teaches a class at Loyola during spring semesters called Bird Conservation and Ecology. He said the class focuses on the big picture of birds across the world before narrowing down to the U.S., including the Great Lakes region.

Igleski and Mitten noted the hypothesized morphological consequences the birds could be suffering due to warmer habits. 

“We can see that change wherein our birds are seemingly getting smaller, because the smaller you are, the more heat you lose in the bigger yard,” Mitten said. “And then, they get longer wings. The longer the extremities, the greater the increase in surface area per unit volume, which precipitates heat.”

Environmental science graduate student Lily Walker is in Mitten’s Bird Conservation and Ecology class, she said although it’s an undergraduate class, she’s doing research on the sharp decline of the population of the rusty blackbird species, which has decreased between 85% and 95% over 50 years, according to a 2018 NAS publication.

“Birds are very crucial for us,” Walker said. “They also have intrinsic value that I don’t think we should ignore. And for that reason, I think we as stewards of the earth should be here to protect them instead of destroying their habitats.”