Birds suffering from “time shift” egg laying

In yet even more bad news for common British creatures, our once highly familiar birds such as the Chaffinch, Blue Tit and Robin are suffering from something called “phenological shift”.

What this means is that the birds are nesting and laying their eggs earlier in the year than they used to.

Admittedly this is not a big shift; in fact they are laying their eggs just about a week earlier than they did in the sixties.

Well that all doesn’t sound so bad, they lay their eggs a week earlier than when I was a child, what’s the big deal?

The problem is that these eye laying and hatching times were not picked at random, nature selected these periods for a reason.

The problem is that when the little clicks hatch is the peak time for the emergence of their foods.

For example tits feed their young emerging caterpillars; they are soft, easy to digest and have everything that a little chick needs to grow.

The problem with that scenario is that the caterpillars have not shifted their appearance date, and now there is the real danger that the caterpillars that are only around for a couple of weeks will become totally out of synch with the new born chicks.

Just before England won the world cup in 1966 the average British chaffinch would lay its eggs on the 11th May.

Now just a generation later they produce their eggs on the 2nd May, not a big deal in the scheme of things, except that there may be no food around for the chicks to eat for several days.

If this phenomena, caused by increasing average temperatures, continues then it will only take a few more years for all kinds of birds to become utterly out of time with their food sources.

Of course no food for the baby birds means that they will die, and that then leads to the threat of rapidly decreasing British bird numbers.

At the moment the only hope is that the bird’s foods will also succumb to this “phenological shift” and themselves appear earlier in the year, but at the moment that does not seem to be the way things are working out for the birds.