The Decibel - Climate change, migration and Menaka’s epic birding day

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

Point Pelee National Park juts out into Lake Erie like a finger, as every spring thousands of birds touch down on it. It’s a key stop along their migratory routes from the southern U.S., Central and South America to northern Canada.But climate change has been shifting the conditions of migration, making it harder for some birds and ultimately affecting bird populations, which are already in steep decline. Decibel host Menaka Raman-Wilms, producer Rachel Levy-McLaughlin and Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee headed to Point Pelee to see spring migration up close.A special thanks to Matt Fuirst and Birds Canada, and, as well as, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who provided some sounds from their Macaulay Library in this episode.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

So now I'm joined in the studio with producer Madeline White. Hey, Maddie. Hi, Manika. So you've chosen our audio documentary on birds and climate change as your favorite episode that we did this year. Tell me about the backstory, I guess, behind this. Yeah, so this episode was our contribution to the Globe and Mail's Windsor Project. This is a series of stories that the Globe did all year from the Windsor region.

And the reason why our editor-in-chief, David Wamsley, chose Windsor as a region to focus on is because there's a lot happening there in terms of things like EV industry. There are new plants that are being built in that region. Also, you know, it's a chance to showcase what life is like for Canadians who live on the border with the United States. And it allowed us to tell, you know, another big file

from this year, which was housing, to tell that story from a specific city. So because we were doing this series, it gave me an opportunity to do a story that I'd actually been thinking about for a while, which was to look at the challenges birds are having when their vitally important habitats are starting to change because of climate change. Okay, so you'd been thinking about this idea to do a story around birds for a while. Can you, I guess, take me back to the origin of that? Like, where did that idea come from? So the reason why I'd been thinking about it is because I know Point Pelee National Park is in the Windsor region. And I myself am a birder and I have been to Point Pelee once for spring migration. And I must say that it is like Mecca for birders in Canada. It's just there's

nothing like it. There's a whole festival and it's wild. It's not just that you see so many species of birds. You also see so many species of birders, which is great. You do both bird watching and people watching. I also knew that it was changing. The landscape there was changing and it has so many different types of habitats and it is so important in migration that I wanted to understand that on a more scientific level. And so when I pitched the idea as part of this series, I knew we had to ask our colleague, Marcus Gee, because he is also a fellow globomail birder. Sometimes we bird together, we go birding together. And needless to say, Marcus was very excited when I said that I'd pitch this story. Yeah, he was quite an enthusiastic birder. I can't attest to that. Let's talk a little bit about how this episode came together, Maddie, because this actually, it wasn't smooth sailing when we started this process.

No, it was not. It was until it wasn't. And the turning point was about 48 hours before we were supposed to go to Point Pelee. That's right. That was the original plan. Yes. It turned out that in the end, I could not go with you because I got COVID for the first time, like the Saturday before we were supposed to leave and we were leaving on a Monday morning. And so frantically, I wrote up like this five page itinerary and our colleague Rachel stepped in and saved the day and went on my behalf and joined you on the trip.

But there was a hot minute there where I was feverish and freaking out and trying to change the hotel reservation to make sure that Rachel could have a bed to sleep in. And the lady who was so kind at the hotel was like, oh, you're sick with COVID. And then she started to give me this recipe for a tea that she said cured her of COVID. And anyways, it was a feverish moment. And I'm just glad that the episode came together in the end. Yeah, it was a it was a hectic little while there. But yeah, Rachel stepped in and then it all it all went smoothly from there. Just lastly, Maddie, like just tell me you've explained kind of the reason behind this episode. But why was this your favorite episode that we did the whole year? Well, I think it is my favorite episode of 2024 because it's truly one of the most immersive episodes that we've ever done on the show.

I mean, you and Rachel bring us into the park and it's like you and Rachel brought me there, even though I was sick at the time and it meant I didn't miss it. So that's why it's my favorite episode of the year. Well, let's go birding. Let's go to Point Pelee National Park. That's not a trumpet. It's actually a swan, appropriately called the trumpeter swan. It's all white with a black bill, and it can weigh around 25 pounds. All of that heft helps with its honk. This species of swan was nearly extinct by the 1800s, but they've come back because of conservation efforts. Even though birds exist all around us,

most of us don't give them a second thought. Birds play a vital role in sustaining our ecosystems. If you want to know about the health of an environment, just watch the bird populations. And what they're saying right now is that we've got some serious challenges. Since 1970, we've lost 3 billion birds in North America, according to a 2019 study in the journal Science. And climate change

is making some of the current threats to birds even worse. So to better understand these creatures, I headed to one of Canada's hottest birding spots with Decibel producer Rachel Levy-McLaughlin to see spring migration up close. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. All right, great. Where are we going, Mainika? We are going to Leamington, Ontario, which is very close to Point Pelee, which is where one of the biggest bird migrations happen. It's like this tiny little point that juts out,

and I think it's one of the southernmost, or if not the southernmost point in Canada. Ooh. I think it's the southernmost, looking at the map. Okay. Three hours, 26 minutes. Point Pelee sticks out in Lake Erie and intersects two major bird migratory routes. Think of it like two highways in the sky meeting, and there's a stop between them where you can refuel and rest.

That's Point Pelee National Park. Use the right lane to take exit 48 onto Highway 77 toward Leamington. And while the birds were making their way there, a lot of people were too. The woman at the hotel told me that everyone staying at the hotel are birders. She was like, are you a birder? I was like, well, we're going to talk to the birders. That's very fun. So there's going to be lots of people doing the exact same thing we are. Yeah, everyone will be getting up early.

Getting up early. To go see the birds. Going to the park. The next morning, we set out to find our birding crew. I'm Marcus G., and I write a column for the Globe and Mail. I'm kind of a lousy birder. Like, I'm an enthusiastic but a very poor birder. Well, enthusiasm is the most important part, I guess.

Yeah, I guess so. I'm always craning my neck and saying, What's that? What's that? I'm Jeremy Bensett. I'm a local birder and tour guide in the Point Pelee area. We're on a quest to try to see 100 species of birds in the Point Pelee area today. We're going to do our best to get there. 100 birds is ambitious, even with a professional guide like Jeremy.

But we wanted to see if we could do it to truly understand how important this tiny slice of Canada is, and what's at risk if climate patterns change. There's a bird there that I was wondering. There's also a bird very similar with like a red stripe on it. Yes, this one does actually. Oh, it does have red on it. Yeah, red and yellow.

Red-winged blumber. Red-winged, okay. Marcus has identified it. Our first bird of the day. So, yeah, that's... There's going to be about a million of those. And we're just standing here in the parking lot. We're literally right next to the parking lot, yeah, that's... There's going to be about a million of those. And we're just standing here in the parking lot. We're literally right next to the parking lot, yeah.

Part of the reason why Point Pelee is teeming with birds is because it's full of food for them. And it's that abundance of food that draws migratory birds away from their southern winter homes to come to Canada for the spring and summer to raise their young. But that's only part of what drives migratory birds to fly hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers every spring. It depends on both an internal clock and response to the environment. That's Dr. Scott McDougall Shackleton, a professor of both psychology and biology, who studies birds, their brains, and migration.

He's also the director of Western University's Advanced Facility for Avian Research. Something internal lets them know that spring is coming. And then they also respond to cues like the days getting longer. That can trigger a whole change in their brain, change in their hormone levels that will facilitate their spring migration. Part of what happens inside birds to trigger migration remains a mystery to researchers. So we don't know how all of these cues, like increasing in day length, actually lead to changes in the brain and the hormones. We have some information, but there's a lot missing. Something inside that bird can keep track of the time of year so that birds that are down in the southern hemisphere have a sense of what time of year it is and that it's the appropriate time for them to go north. When you stop to think about bird migration, it's pretty incredible. Take the

black pole warbler, a songbird that's about 14 centimeters long. That's shorter than your phone. And it weighs about 12 grams, roughly four ping pong balls. This tiny little black and white bird flies for almost three days nonstop, covering thousands of kilometers, including long stretches over the Atlantic Ocean, to get to their winter homes in the Caribbean and the north part of South America. To make the journeys, these birds use a combination of instinct, memory, and landmarks. We know that for the long part of the journey, they have a map and a compass. For the compass, they use the position of the sun, the position of the stars.

They can detect magnetic fields. And they use all of these cues in order to know roughly the direction. But then when they get close to their breeding ground, they start using landmarks. So they'll recognize coastlines, the rivers, forest edges, all of those landmarks that you or I would use when we're finding our way around a familiar location. And each then year after year, birds will return often to within 10 or 20 meters

of where they nested the previous year. In Point Pelee, one of the birds that was returning to its summer home was the Prothonotary Warbler. It was the fifth bird we spotted on our quest to see 100. So there's a very bright little yellow bird down there, much brighter yellow than the yellow warblers that we've seen a few of. This is an endangered species in Canada. This is called Prothonotary Warbler. This wouldn't be able to survive in the winter here because it's small and has a thin beak and eats flies. And this is one of the only spots in the country where this bird breeds.

Habitat loss is causing an increase in the number of endangered bird species, like the Prothonotary Warbler. Deforestation, agriculture, pesticides, logging, and other developments that make life easier for humans are making it harder for the birds. And this is happening to them in both their breeding grounds in Canada and their overwinter homes in the South. These changes affect some types of birds more than others. In Canada, nearly 60% of grassland birds have disappeared since 1970. And we've also lost a huge amount of another type of bird called aerial insectivores, meaning they primarily eat flying bugs. Point Pelee is such an important piece of land for migration because it has multiple habitats in a small geographic region. There are forests, shorelines, marshes and meadows, and some that you can't really find anywhere else in Canada.

It's so far south that if you look at it on a map, it's on par with Northern California. Yeah, this is a rare habitat even for southern Ontario. It certainly feels kind of neotropical. Like you can imagine when it gets hot and humid in like July here and the leaves are completely out on the trees, like you feel like you're in Florida. We started our search for 100 species in some of these leafy forested areas of Point Pelee.

Yeah, that common grackle over there. So that's like one of your typical like blackbirds that would be at your bird feeders. That was my first bird through the binoculars. Cool. Oh yeah, it's got like kind of a blue head actually. I can see it. Yeah, they are really nice looking. You get the light on them and all kinds of iridescent colors.

So we're looking relatively high into the treetop here and we're looking for so female scarlet tanagers are green colored they're like yellow green and blended really really well whereas the males are like scarlet red with black wings on them they say you know we have red winged blackbirds and these are the black winged red birds. That's really cute. Oh, up there. Oh yeah. What is it? These are cedar waxwings. And so these are the birds I was saying were flying over earlier. Oh yeah.

And they're doing like a courtship thing feeding each other. They're just passing like one berry back and forth. Oh yeah. They're doing like a courtship thing, feeding each other. They're just passing like one berry back and forth. Oh yeah. After the forest, we traveled to one of the park's wetlands where we saw a collection of warblers, including the yellow warbler, the chestnut-sided warbler, the black-throated blue warbler, and the warbling vireo,

which is actually not a warbler. We also spied some shorebirds and waterfowl, including the American golden plover and a bird with long toes called a sora. Yeah, and I basically just, oh, did you hear that one? So that was a sora. They basically are a little chicken-shaped kind of thing. They walk around in grassy wetland like this. So that bird's actually extremely close. We can probably get a really brief look at it.

When you're birding, time seems to slow down. Some birders say the activity is a form of mindfulness, where they're fully present in nature. I was just going to say, to me, it's a bit like having a sixth sense, being a birder, because everybody else is walking along and they're hearing tweet, tweet, tweet. But you're hearing, oh, that's Baltimore Oriole, that's the yellow warbler. And so you're just more aware of your surroundings,

your natural surroundings, and it's a cool kind of insight into the natural world that most people just don't have because they're not tuned in. You're kind of tuned into nature, I guess. Hey Marcus, what's our tally now? Let's check it out. 50. 50? Hey, halfway there. Wow. That's awesome.

We'll be right back. The mark of an impressive birder is someone who can bird by ear, as they say. They can identify a bird just by hearing its call or song. This skill is hard to develop, but there are some tricks. Some birds' names are actually just their calls, like the eastern wood peewee that goes... Others have songs that can be remembered using a mnemonic device, like the song of the white-throated sparrow. To recall it, people use the phrase,

Oh sweet Canada, Canada, Canada. And advanced birders like Jeremy are able to not just identify the songs, but also describe them. It's like, eolay. That one there. So that's a wood thrush. That's one that breeds in the woodland here. But also like more or less all of these birds.

It's a migrant that just arrived recently. That bird is also a species at risk in Ontario and Canada. In addition to losing their habitat, these creatures are also facing newer threats because of climate change and our warming planet. The main challenge with climate change is the potential for mismatched timing. That's bird expert Dr. McDougall Shackleton again from Western University. Birds that migrate, some of them come back very reliably at certain times of year. We call those calendar birds. Other birds are much more flexible and will migrate very slowly and respond to weather conditions. Are the leaves coming out yet?

Are there insects available? And they're much more flexible about when they migrate. The birds that are calendar birds are the ones that are going to have more of a risk of mismatch. This is because as springs advance, plants come out sooner, the insects come out sooner, the birds are responding to the old clock. They're the old calendar. And so if they come back, say, on May 2nd every year, May 2nd now might be too late. The insects that they need to feed their babies might have already emerged and they may arrive too late in order to breed. This mismatch can have severe effects over time. When those birds arrive too late, they will usually be able to survive themselves.

There might be enough food for them, but they can have nest failures. And so that means they're not producing young, and you're going to have a long-term population consequence with fewer of that species. Food reserves are even more important when you consider that birds are having to expend more energy to migrate. During their travels, they deal with more frequent and more severe storms because of the changes happening in our climate. During migration, storms can interrupt migration. It can throw birds off course. Some species will actually perform a reverse migration in order to avoid storms, go back south for a day or two,

and then come back north and affect their timing. And during the breeding season, storms can affect the nest success. The other thing that can happen is a fallout. Here's how our Point Pelee guide, Jeremy, described it. If the weather changes, if it shifts quickly to like cool north wind, or if there's a heavy rainfall in the middle or late part of the night, that's when we experience a real big influx of migrant birds in the morning time. They'll all find woodland to land. And that's when we experience what birders call a fallout, because they're literally falling out of the sky from the weather conditions. How different weather conditions and changes in our climate affect birds is something they study at Western University's Advanced Facility for Avian Research. I'm Chris Guglielmo. I'm a professor of biology here at Western University,

and I'm also director of the Center for Animals on the Move. And what are we doing today? We are doing a tour of the Advanced Facility for Avian Research at Western University. This facility has dozens of rooms where researchers can study everything from how birds learn their songs to how different parts of their brains grow and shrink depending on the season. The most unique testing space is a hypobaric wind tunnel. So we're standing on a stairs now overlooking the wind tunnel, so you can get a good picture of the whole layout.

Basically, there's a giant tube that runs the length of the building on the second level. It comes down at each end of the building and then runs back the other way. So that creates a loop called a recirculating wind tunnel. And on the upper level, on the second story, is a giant fan. So we get this recirculating air around in the loop, and the bird is flying downstairs basically on a treadmill. Researchers can change atmospheric conditions in the tunnel. Things like temperature, humidity, even air pressure, which can simulate the conditions a bird faces when flying at a high altitude. It's actually the only wind tunnel for birds that can do this in the world. We've had a songbird called the black pole warbler fly 28 hours in here non-stop and this past year we

had shorebird western sandpiper flying here for 38 hours without stopping now a wild western sandpiper was actually radio tracked flying 42 hours minimum non-stop so they can naturally do those kinds of flights but when we were able to do that in the wind tunnel, it just totally blew our minds. So let me go fire it up here. All right, so let's just set this. They also test how things like high-intensity winds during storms affect the energy a bird has to use to fly through them. And the experiments that were done manipulated the air pressure to simulate either a storm coming in or good weather, and then measured the changes in the restlessness behavior. And in that case, what we found was if we simulated southerly winds,

which in the spring mean like a low pressure approaching and temperatures going up, they expressed a lot more migratory restlessness. And if they thought there was a storm coming in, they would start feeding earlier in the daytime. When the lights came on, they would go to the food cup right away as if they expected, okay, bad weather is coming in. They've also examined what happens to birds as they face higher temperatures and more humidity during migration. They found that birds actually burn up more of their muscles and organs to counteract the hotter temperatures during their long flights. The day we were in Point Pelee trying to see 100 birds,

our guide Jeremy said it was a slow day for birds. Late in the afternoon, after visiting forests, marshes, shorelines, and even the actual point of Point Pelee, we were only at 73 birds. It didn't feel like we were going to hit our goal. It was ambitious. Very ambitious. 73 birds is a species. It's still a lot of species. It is a lot of birds. I mean, yeah. I'm pretty happy with that.

And the thing is, you don't really, it shouldn't be about the race anyway, right? About notching up the numbers if you're just notching them then you're racing from place to place you don't even pause to look at the birds and like admire their behavior and their plumage and all these things so yeah and it's cool to have a list i like making a list but the thing about bird watching is even if it's a terrible day for birds, you still have a nice walk in nature. And so it's never like, oh, that was a terrible day. And it hasn't been a terrible day for birds. We've seen a lot of birds.

No, it's been excellent. So no complaints. And other animals, too. Yep. So what you're saying is it's totally fine if we don't make it to 100 birds. Totally fine. Totally fine. I don't make it to 100 birds? Totally fine. Totally fine. I didn't have my...

Honestly, I didn't. It's not a big deal that we... It's about the journey, right? We've been on a journey. Yes, I've heard that said. It's all about the journey. It sounds like accepting the cute early. Sounds like justifying our complete failure, I know.

But no, I'm sincerely not disappointed whatsoever. In a last-ditch effort, we left the formal confines of the park and visited another protected spot, Hillman Marsh Conservation Area. It was there we saw the trumpeter swan. Oh yeah, hey, that's a new species, right? Yeah. Marcus, did you see the swans? Gotta count them on our list. What were the swans called again, Jeremy?

These are trumpeter swans. Trumpeter swans. We had been birding for almost 10 hours. But we were finding new species at this marsh. No, it's not about the numbers. But we're up to 88 species. We're finding new species at this marsh. No, it's not about the numbers. But we're up to 88 species. And what time is it?

5.05 in the afternoon. Three hours of daylight left. We spotted a new species of warbler, the golden-winged warbler. It doesn't have that sweet, wistly voice like all the other warblers. This one's just like... And even a new shorebird, the killdeer. It looks a lot like the semi-palmated sandpiper or plover we were looking at before, but the killdeer has two rings. It's a lot larger.

It stands more upright like that. We spied a medium-sized black-and-white duck with a golden eye, the lesser scop. Okay, we've just added the lesser scop to the list, and now we're at 99. I just need one more. Come on. Come on, guys. Come on, little birdies. One more. You can do it. It took almost 12 hours to find that many species.

And if bird populations continue to decline, a goal like this might be much more difficult in the future. We asked Dr. Scott McDougall-Shackleton of Western University how he felt about the challenges ahead for bird populations when it comes to the pressures of climate change. I'm cautiously optimistic. Birds are very charismatic and a lot of people care about them. And so we can use birds as a way to gather public attention to these challenges we're facing. We have a lot of success stories, but there are other birds that aren't doing so well. And so what we need to do is take the success we've had with some groups of birds

and now target it to those birds that are most at risk. That's going to include preserving habitat, as well as doing everything we can to mitigate the effects of changes in the landscape due to climate change and changes in their food supply. Our guide, Jeremy, made the task of identifying the final bird, ours. We had to use the skills he'd given us that day to find number 100. It's been a long day, Monica. We got it. So Marcus is going to find the 100th bird for us. What? Me? Pressure. Too much pressure.

I'm a terrible birder, I told you. See, but my problem is that I see a bird. But is that a new bird? I don't know. Then we saw more swans. But Marcus noticed that they didn't have black beaks like the trumpeters. They had orange ones. Ah! Sorry? Those are mute swans. We haven't seen them before, so I'm calling 100. 100? All right.

Fair? Can you point out the swan? Where's the swan? Behind Jeremy, all the way over there. Oh, yeah. Those are the kind of swans you see in parks. Boom. Nice job. We did it.

We did it. And unlike the trumpeter swan, whose name comes from its honk, the mute swan isn't actually mute. It just makes more of a sneeze and snort sound. Ah! Ah! Ah! That's it for today. Special thanks to Matt First and the folks at Birds Canada,

who shared their research for this episode. If you want to learn more about the different factors that threaten birds and how to address them, you can check out birdscanada.org slash guide. A few of the bird sounds you heard today were courtesy of Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library. And a thank you to Jeremy Bensett for helping us find 100 species of birds. His tour company is called Peely Birding. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Kelsey Arnett is our intern. This episode was written and produced by Madeline White. Our other producers are Cheryl Sutherland and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.