SWALLOWS ARE arriving in Ireland earlier each year but cuckoos are so confused by climate change that they are now turning up in northern Europe too late to drop their eggs in other birds’ nests.
According to Konstantin Kreiser, of BirdLife International, this is happening because the “short-hop” migratory birds that cuckoos normally use as surrogate parents are flying north earlier from the Mediterranean basin.
By the time cuckoos arrive from southern Africa in April, many of these birds already have hatchlings and “they’ve missed the boat”, he said. “It’s a very good example of how climate change can bring confusion in the ecological system.”
At a press briefing in Brussels yesterday during the European Commission’s Green Week, Mr Kreiser said birds might be expected to adapt to changing climatic conditions, but the scale and speed of global warming had left cuckoos in the lurch.
As for native European birds, he warned that climate change represented a “grave threat” to most species and said these birds “will have to shift northwards or uphill” if they are to survive at all in a warmer world.
Mr Kreiser said this underlined the need to protect natural ecosystems everywhere. “If New Orleans had been surrounded by mangrove forests, as it once was, it might not have suffered as much flooding [from Hurricane Katrina in 2005]”.
Ladislav Miko, the Czech environment minister and former European Commission official in charge of habitat protection, said the EU birds directive had helped to save endangered species over 30 years. He also described the EU’s Natura 2000 programme to protect wildlife habitats in Europe as a “big success”.
Jeff McNeely, chief scientist with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said maintaining healthy ecosystems – especially wildlife habitats – would be a lot less costly in the long run than dealing with the consequences of climate change.
“We’re not talking about something our children will inherit. The problem is here, right now, and we’re already losing species. Just look at the dying coral reefs as a result of ocean acidification. It can’t be put off for another two years,” he said.
Asked about forecasts that the world’s population could reach nine billion by 2050, Mr McNeely noted global GDP had usually kept pace with population growth. “But maybe in the last year we’ve learned something. We’ve hit a wall,” he added.
The theme of this year’s Green Week in Brussels is “Climate change: act and adapt”. If only someone could tell the unfortunate cuckoos.
