Finding Higher Ground: Adaptation in the Age of Warming - Softcover

Seidl, Amy

 
9780807084991: Finding Higher Ground: Adaptation in the Age of Warming
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0807084999 ISBN 13: 9780807084991
Verlag: Beacon Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

While much of the global warming conversation rightly focuses on reducing our carbon footprint, the reality is that even if we were to immediately cease emissions, we would still face climate change into the next millennium. In Finding Higher Ground, Amy Seidl takes the uniquely positive—yet realistic—position that humans and animals can adapt and persist despite these changes. Drawing on an emerging body of scientific research, Seidl brings us stories of adaptation from the natural world and from human communities. She offers examples of how plants, insects, birds, and mammals are already adapting both behaviorally and genetically. While some species will be unable to adapt to new conditions quickly enough to survive, Seidl argues that those that do can show us how to increase our own capacity for resilience if we work to change our collective behavior. In looking at climate change as an opportunity to establish new cultural norms, Seidl inspires readers to move beyond loss and offers a refreshing call to evolve.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amy Seidl is an ecologist, writer, and teacher. She is the author of Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World. Amy teaches at the University of Vermont and lives near Burlington with her husband and their children in a solar-powered home.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 3
On Migration
 
Dead Creek gently meanders in an oxbow pattern through Vermont’s fertile farm country before spilling out into Lake Champlain. Along it stretch miles of land planted in feed corn, forage for the dairy cows kept in the nearby barns. Hedgerows and farmhouses punctuate the pattern of rectangular fields of grain. Occasionally a herd forages in an open pasture.
 
Since the turn of the twentieth century, biologists have recorded the arrival of snow geese at Dead Creek in the fall. Amateur birders flock to see clamoring geese drop from the sky. Their loud whouk, whouk, whouk ricochets across the valley as family groups of geese call to one another, land, and settle into feeding.
 
A mix of factors draws snow geese to Dead Creek and the Lake Champlain valley. Fields of corn stubble feed them, and there is plenty of open space that allows thousands of the white-winged birds to descend together. And a wide lake provides direction as southern-flowing water leads to coastal wetlands and marshes where the geese overwinter. At Dead Creek, the birds fuel up for the second leg of their fall migration that began in the Arctic and will end in a marshy patch thousands of miles to the south.
 
For two weeks I have heard geese overhead, honking to each other and flying in the classic V formation. Each time I hear them I stop and search the gray sky for flapping birds. I finally line up the sounds with the dark shapes of the birds’ bodies as they move swiftly through the air. I count by tens, and estimate four hundred in one flock, nine hundred in another, only fifty in a third. I try to keep track of them as long as I can until they evaporate into the distant sky. Yet even when I can’t see them, I can hear the lead birds reporting back to the flock.
 
Hearing geese migrate is a signal. Like a deciduous forest changing colors or the way onions sweeten after the first frost, it announces that autumn has arrived. The age-old pattern of leaving an area when local resources grow scarce has begun. This place is no longer suitable; it is time to move on.
 
The day is clear and cloudless when I arrive at Dead Creek in mid-October. It is close to peak migration and not uncommon to see twenty thousand snow geese in a single field. A dozen cars are parked at the refuge kiosk, and I see several people with binoculars around their necks. Others have set up cameras and tripods, hoping to capture the expanse of white birds milling and pecking. I walk to the kiosk but already know from the absence of sound that there is nothing here. There are no geese, only observers looking up into the soundless sky. The birds are late and we are asking why. Perhaps warmer conditions to the north have kept them there. Or maybe agriculture has expanded in upstate New York and southern Canada and there is more corn stubble in the fields persuading them to remain longer. It could be a combination of these factors, or neither. We do not know.
 
Migration is a long-established strategy in human and nonhuman worlds. Songbirds migrate to overwintering grounds when food grows scarce in the north. Monarch butterflies migrate south to hang torpid from the boughs of tropical evergreens when northern milkweed leaves brown and die back. African pastoralists, nomadic Tibetans, and Minnesotan “snowbirds” migrate annually too. All are seeking better conditions: weather, food, forage, water.
 
Human and nonhuman migrations are linked as adaptive strategies in response to changing conditions. As Earth warms, new migration patterns and alterations in old ones are occurring. Snow geese arrive later to Vermont’s cornfields, and songbirds—wrens, warblers, and thrushes—shorten their flights south. Fish and insects are migrating differently too, seeking climate spaces that allow them to mate, flower, or otherwise behave as they do now. Organisms are adapting their migrations to a northern climate that is more suitable during winter, a season that is no longer the death sentence it once was. Some, like snow geese, are staying later in their northern breeding grounds. Others, like black brant geese, are forgoing migration altogether.
 
Environmental conditions are not static. They vary and organisms adjust. Over the last twelve thousand years, since the advent of the interglacial period known as the Holocene—the time when agriculture arose in human societies and large Pleistocene animals like the woolly mammoth and saber-toothed tiger went extinct—countless migrations have occurred. As glaciers retreated, animals and plants ventured north to colonize newly ice-free lands. Many species expanded their ranges once the ground and waterways were let loose from the ice. Others remained in the south most of the year but ventured north to take advantage of the flush spring and bountiful summer. Thus the evolution of seasonal migrations in animals arose as a way to increase the number and fitness of a species’ offspring; southern species could increase their progeny by exploiting the fresh growth and abundant prey in northern latitudes and then return to more benign conditions for the remainder of the year.
 
Migration in North America is often thought of as the movement of animals from the south to the north and back again. But there are also shorter migrations that happen within the North American continent itself. Carolina wrens, for instance, migrate south, but only to Maine and Vermont after spending the summer in Canadian forests, and Arctic caribou migrate above the Arctic Circle to feed on the new young growth of tundra shrubs and birth their young before they return south to winter in Canada’s northern forests.
 
As the planet enters the Age of Warming, migratory animals are accommodating changing conditions, the very evolutionary stimulus from which their migratory behavior arose. Biologists are observing animals as they alter their historic migrations to avoid trophic mismatch, which is being in the once-correct location but at a time when expected resources have passed. Caribou, which have timed their migration to correspond with new plant growth, are finding that the earliness of spring prevents them from feeding on the most nutri tious young leaves, the value of which lactating females pass on to their young.
 
Similarly, the great tit, a songbird that migrates from North Africa to the United Kingdom each summer, times its migration to feed on the larvae of the winter moth. Historically, great tits hatched in synchrony with the abundance of their preferred prey. But with spring’s advance, the moth, which times its emergence with young oak leaves, has also advanced and is laying its eggs earlier. Its larvae are grown and gone by the time the great tit touches down from North Africa, leaving it with an empty plate. Like the caribou’s arctic shrubs, the winter moth is responding to early spring conditions and upsetting the table before the great tit has even arrived. Species involved in these types of trophic mismatches, where migration has evolved to be synchronous with resources, are the ones at greatest risk. Paradoxically, they are also the ones under the greatest selective pressure to change.
 
In December 2008 brown pelicans, migrating south from the Northwest Coast to Mexico’s Baja Peninsula were caught in a winter storm. Hundreds of pelicans fell from the sky. Wildlife rehabilitators combed the beaches and picked up the gangly birds as they drifted in California’s waters, disoriented and dying of frostbite and starvation. The pelicans, which typically migrate out of the Northwest earlier in the fall, had remained to eat the booming numbers of anchovies and sardines, salty fishes they consumed with...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Beacon Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0807084999
ISBN 13 
9780807084991
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
216
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
eucomply OÜ
hello@eucompliancepartner.com

Pärnu mnt 139b-14
Tallinn
11317
Estland