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Steve Hampton on Birds and Climate Change
January 21 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Free
Join us on Zoom for Steve Hampton’s timely presentation about birds and climate change: the changes that are already happening, with a special focus on Northern California.
Birds are responding to climate change, and have been since the mid-1980s. It has only become clear recently. What started as a little bump in the data is now clearly the start of a massive exponential curve. Lesser Goldfinches and California Scrub-jays, among many others, are invading the Pacific Northwest. Anna’s Hummingbirds are over-wintering in Alaska. All booby species have been removed from California’s review list. And Western Tanagers are now regular in winter in increasing numbers. At the same time, Wrentits and Oak Titmice are going nowhere. The world of Ivory Gulls and Black Guillemots is melting. Birds are evacuating from the Mojave Desert and literally shrinking, physically, from the Amazon to North America to the Middle East.
The world is changing so fast, and birds with it, that papers are outdated by the time they are published. But the main themes are the same:
- Many birds are responding quickly to rapid climate change.
- Some are not.
- Birds, as a kingdom, like warm weather, and did very well during the last major global warming event 55 million years ago.
- At the species level, there will be winners and losers.
Steve Hampton has been birding since he was 7 years old. He lived in Davis for 30 years and worked for California Dept of Fish and Wildlife much of that time, where he was involved in oil spill response, natural resource damage assessment, seabird restoration, and partnerships with Native communities. He writes regularly for Birding magazine, recently served on the American Ornithological Society’s Ad-hoc Committee on English Bird Names, and currently resides in Port Townsend, where he serves as the conservation chair and CBC compiler for Rainshadow Bird Alliance. He combines his love of birds with a PhD in resource economics to analyze bird data. His article in the December 2022 issue of Birding summarized the recent research on birds and climate change. He will present that information, with a special focus on Northern California.
Use this link to join us on January 21. We will begin the presentation at around 7 pm.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/