A few posts back (1774) I showed you a BB article about " The Death of Ornithology" ....and a few pages on there was an attempt to predict what Britain's birds would be in 2100 (??!!) Imagine, if you will, the British avifauna a century hence. Long-term forecasting is not without its pitfalls, but the weight of evidence suggests that today's predictions are likely to be more accurate than those in the past .If they are fulfilled, then our avifauna will certainly be very different form what we know today. There will be fewer breeding species. Many northerly ones will either have disappeared or have much reduced populations. Others, especially those which currently have a southerly range, will have expanded northwards and increased in population. There will be new additions to our breeding avifauna, mainly species currently expanding their ranges on the continent. Many species dependent on a specialised habitat, however, such as farmland, heathland or wetland birds, will have decreased in numbers and range. Resident breeding species, especially highly adaptable ones such as pigeons, crows and gulls, will have increased, and ,together with a greater variety of alien species, will dominate our birdlife. In winter, formerly crowded estuaries and coastal wetlands will support a much reduced variety of species and numbers of birds. Meanwhile, some of out rarer winter visitors will have to be replaced by increasing numbers of former summer visitors spending the whole year here. Long-distance migrants will have undergone a series if catastrophic population crashes. Well ....... that was written 20-odd years ago. Have any of those projections started to come true ? So .... let's try not to worry too much ...... and let's listen to a spot of music ... have you worked out what that bird was in the song I put on the previous post ?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
|