WETTER THAN AN OTTER’S POCKET
Winter 2023/24 hasn’t been a winter. It’s been one extended autumn and a very soggy one at that.
It’s been so wet here at RSPB Old Moor’s aptly named wetlands that I swear I saw a Coot with a case of trench foot. Our birdwatching reports now include observations like "Eurasian Wigeon attempting synchronised swimming routine" and "Common Starlings forming a water ballet troupe." We’ve had so much rain in the seemingly endless round of named storms that I wonder where it’s all coming from. Is there a hole in the middle of the Atlantic where all the water has been sucked out in preparation of dumping it down on Britain?
The hardy Robin that visits my Shed is slightly befuddled, trying to figure out if it’s time to bring out his big coat yet. With Spring on the horizon he’s not sure if he's supposed to build a nest or an ark.
Our local owl community is equally confused. They're used to perching stoically on frost-covered branches, looking mysterious and wise. Now, they're trading frosty glares with each other from inside rain-soaked tree hollows. This weather is no joke for them. Owls can hunt very well in cold, crisp conditions, even when everything is covered with a blanket of snow a few inches deep. They hear the slightest mousy movement and use it to home in on their prey, but when it’s wet like it has been for days and nights on end they face a serious risk of starvation. If they can’t hear their prey moving, they can’t hunt it.
For those of us who were born in the current century, this has been a fairly normal changing of the year. But dig into the figures and you find that the end of 2023 was the wettest since the notorious winter of 1890, and even I’m not old enough to remember that one. I am old enough to remember snow though. Proper snow, deep and crisp and even. Those of us of a certain age will recall the kind of snow that fell for days, drifted to the height of a full grown adult and stayed around for weeks. When I was a lad (sorry youngsters), long-lasting snow in winter was as predictable as seeing a gull outside a seaside chip shop. At the risk of sounding like a miserable old man steeped in nostalgic longings (which I am), whatever happened to those years when winter meant wrapping up in layers thicker than several duvets and taking your sledge for a spin down the nearest hill? It's like the snow itself has migrated, leaving us with nothing but frosty memories.
In just half a century we’ve gone from snow and sub-zero temperatures being a normal part of winter to them being very much unusual and short-lived occurrences. Yes, my car’s ‘low temperature’ alarm has beeped at me occasionally this winter but we haven’t had treacherous or even undrivable conditions due to the roads being turned into solid sheets of ice. Snow ploughs and gritters have been locked snuggly away in their garages for most of the season.
So what has happened to winter? You’ve guessed it; it’s our old frenemy, Climate Change. Global temperatures have risen an incredible two degrees in just my lifetime. The Met Office say that this pattern of extreme hot weather conditions in the UK followed by extremely wet ones is likely to become the new normal with record levels of rainfall and high temperatures being broken year on year.
If this is the new normal then, how can our birds hope to survive with the world around them changing so swiftly? The answer is simple; adapt or die.
Fortunately, most of the birds that we see here in South Yorkshire are quite short-lived. For example Blue Tits usually live for about three years, Coots for maybe double that and a lucky Greylag Goose might see its tenth birthday. You can see that the larger the bird, the longer its life expectancy but they all live much shorter lives than we do. I say ‘fortunately’ because these short lifespans are actually a good thing in evolutionary terms as they mean that any adaptation that needs to be implemented over several generations can occur quite quickly; certainly quickly enough for us humans to observe the changes within our own short span of years.
The birds that roost in trees must adapt to higher average winter temperatures. This could mean that those species which have historically migrated might no longer do so, leading to a reduction of diversity in our bird species as those that might have left for winter decide to stay, and those who would have come here to escape the unpalatable weather in their summer homelands find that it’s quite acceptable there for them to stay there throughout the year. We’ll see fewer species overall. That’s bad news for listers.
For those whose life is spent mostly on the water, a further problem arises. More water means deeper water, which makes it difficult for many waders to feed. If you’re only five inches tall, and your home is suddenly two feet deep then you will go hungry. You have to move to somewhere more suitable, which isn’t easy when it seems like the entire country is submerged. Again, some of our traditional winter visitors might find that Britain’s wetlands are no longer habitable.
So is the weather change a good thing or a bad thing? Or is it just a change? This old world of ours has seen many changes before we came along and will doubtless see many more when you and I are long gone. Whatever happens the birds will have to change their way of life or they won’t survive; that’s literally the nature of things. But me? I think it’s time to break out my new big waterproof hat.
Volunteer Shaun welcomes visitors to RSPB Old Moor. He also writes a weekly blog about life at the reserve titled, "View From the Shed". He usually wears a big hat.
An interesting blog. It’s noticeable that some rare birds for S Yorkshire that I studied avidly as a child in my now battered Observers Book of Birds have now adapted and become common. The obvious one is the Little Egret though there are others like the GW Egret and Spoonbill. But I also know that numbers of common birds have declined since the my father’s time as a lad growing up in the local farming countryside.