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Roula Khalaf, editor-in-chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago
Watching the first birds fly south outside my window overlooking Lake Michigan is part of the natural rhythm of life in the American Midwest. But now that rhythm — and the spectacular annual spectacle that is fall migration along the Mississippi River — is increasingly disrupted by humans.
Light pollution and climate change pose new challenges threats to migratory birds. About 88mn warblers and sparrows, wrens and thrushes have flown over my Chicago home so far this fall, struggling to see where they are goingand to find places where feed and rest along the way.
Last year, around 1,000 deceased in a single night when they crash into Chicago’s largest convention center: they are attracted by the light, become disoriented and sometimes collide. This year, the lakeside building was adorned with polka dots in an attempt to prevent bird collisions. Research shows that more than a billion birds die in the United States each year following impacts on buildings. These days I turn off the kitchen light at night during migration season, answering calls to be made my part.
Ed Gittens, 74, has lived most of his life along the largest migration route in the United States, the Mississippi River Flyway. He’s an amateur naturalist and wildlife artist, and I stopped to chat with him earlier this month while driving what’s called the Great River Road along the Mississippi.
“It’s wonderful to see swans, but when you see a lot of them at New Year’s, it’s not fair,” says Gittens, who lives on a river in Minnesota. There have been profound changes in the lives of local birds, he adds. “Usually at Thanksgiving the birds have migrated because the river is frozen, but with climate change it doesn’t freeze and so if food is still available, they stay and eat.”
River levels have also been affected: “I remember the 100-year floods when I was a child, I was six or seven years old, but we have never had two thirds of a summer with ultra high water” , he said (this happened after the 2019 floods). He guides me down the road to see the impact: a vast area of dead floodplain forest.
Dale Gentry, conservation director for Audubon Upper Mississippi River, tells me it’s one of the biggest problems for migratory birds. Trees die in part because they cannot tolerate their roots being submerged in water for months.
Bird schedules also change, says Andrew Farnsworth, a visiting scientist at Cornell’s Center for Avian Population Studies. “The more we look, the more we see the imprint of rapid climate change,” including “some pretty dramatic differences in climate change.” when does spring migration take place? in the Upper Mississippi Valley,” he told me. “Sometimes birds arrive at breeding areas too early when there is too much snow,” meaning there is not enough food. Peak spring migration in the Upper Mississippi is 1.5 to 2 days earlier than it was 20 years ago, he said, adding “that may not seem like much, but if you moved Christmas to Dec. 23 and keep moving it, it would finally be Thanksgiving Day. “.
But it’s not all bad news: Gittens celebrates the recovery of nearly extinct bald eagle populations in the upper Mississippi, after the pesticide DDT was banned in the 1970s. A sign at the nearby National Eagle Center indicates that there was only one breeding pair in the area between 1968 and 1972. There are now more than 300: they fly over my car while I drive.
Herds of American white pelicans flows in the middle of the vast river, turkey vultures going up and down on thermals at dusk next to my cliff top campsite, and an angry man sandhill crane » protests as I walk my dogs through a wetland at dawn. My Merlin The bird watching app selects the songs of nearby sparrows, warblers and wrens.
Is it too late to save the annual bird migration as I know it? Neil Smarjesse, national resource program manager at the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, praises habitat restoration efforts along the Mississippi. “If we can expand them, in the long run we will do more good than harm as human beings,” he says. This is a goal worth aiming for.
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