Minnesota May Lose Two Icons--Moose and Loons

Story in current issue of National Wildlife magazine about the mysterious decline of moose in Minnesota and New Hampshire.

Illustration accompanying story of moose decline in National Wildlife magazine.   The causes may be a mix of  ticks and brain worms, aggravated by milder winters.

Global warming could rob Minnesota of not just its iconic loons, but also its moose.  And ,it could end the storied island life of wolves in Lake Superior’s Isle Royale National Park .

A story in the current issue of National Wildlife magazine describes the “deepening mystery” of why the “moose population in northwestern Minnesota has plunged from 4,000 animals to just 100.  Moose numbers are declining fast in northeastern Minnesota, too, and as far away as central and southern New Hampshire.”

The story also says that “some biologists believe” global warming “is behind the decline of moose in parts of Minnesota.”   Global warming may be working in conjunction with “a triple whammy of parasites, pests and predators.”   In New Hampshire, milder winters  have already increased tick populations to the point where they are draining all the blood out of moose.  Less snow cover also draws in more deer, and with them comes an increase in a brain worm that causes moose to “start walking in circles or just stand around until they become prey or die.”

The opposite is true on Isle Royale where there are no deer and therefore no brain worm.  There also soon may be no more wolves, which depend on the lake freezing periodically to allow wolves to walk to and from the mainland, to avoid inbreeding.   During the past 17 years, a “news of the wild” story in the magazine reads, “ice bridges formed only three times…As a result researchers have tallied the lowest number of wolves ever—an average of fewer than nine yearly during the past three years (the population typically fluctuates between 18 and 27 animals).”

The study of wolves on this island is now in its 56th year.  The study had found long ago that wolves maintain a healthy moose population.   Now moose kills by wolves have dropped to a record low and the moose population has doubled, to about 1,050, threatening the forest on the island, including the balsam fir that is the main food source for moose, demonstrating once again why healthy wolves are crucial to moose survival.

(Sidebar to article in Audubon magazine, listing loons as one of 314 bird species threatened by global warming.)

My copy of the October/November issue of the National Wildlife Federation's National Wildlife magazine arrived in the mail the day after I received Audubon magazine which said, "Minnesota will likely have no more loons in summer by the end of the century."

Extinction for 314 Birds, Including Eagles?

In the 1970s in Maryland I could only see bald eagles in cages.  By the 2000's, I lived a half mile from an eagle nest in Maryland, about 15 miles from the U.S. Capitol building.  And within two weeks of moving to Ohio, in 2012, I saw an eagle's nest about 5 miles from my new home.  Now, climate change threatens a second attempt at extinction for our Nation's symbol.  (Photo by Debbie Hurlbert, Howard, Ohio)

Pick a favorite bird that comes to your yard and it’s probably one of the 314 North American bird species at risk from climate change, according to a recent Audubon report, based on a  seven-year study of 588 species by Audubon’s science team.  The report is published in Audubon Magazine’s special issue, titled “Birds & Climate Change.”

The study suggests that “Nearly half of the bird species in the United States will be seriously threatened by 2080, and any of those could disappear forever.”

Shockingly this would also mean the reversal of one of the biggest conservation success stories, the revival of the bald eagle in my lifetime.  The study projects the bald eagle could lose 71 percent of its current range by 2050.  The report says, “It may see a 56 percent range expansion into areas opened up by global warming, but it will still need prey and nesting habitat in those new areas.”  That means that both their prey and their desired nesting trees must also survive global warming in their new areas, if the bald eagle is to survive there.

The same is true of the golden eagle, whose “breeding range is forecast to shrink 58 percent by 2050 and 79 percent by 2080, although it could potentially colonize new areas,” the report says.

No Loons in Minnesota

As the climate continues warming, all 314 species could lose their preferred habitats.  For example, loons are predicted to be totally gone from Minnesota as its climate warms, shrinking their non-breeding range by 63 percent and their summer breeding habitat range by 32 percent.   Shrink enough and the loons could be extinct.  That’s the basic idea with all the species-on-the-brink listed.

The study used hundreds of thousands of birdwatcher observations for the Audubon Christmas bird counts and the North American Breeding Bird Survey to determine each species’ “climate envelope”.  This envelope pinpoints the range of temperatures, rainfall amounts, and other climate characteristics of the habitats occupied by each species.  As the report states, “Then they looked for each combination of characteristics within sophisticated computer projections of the global climate, finding the future climate envelopes—and, by extension, the potential future ranges—of the species and mapping them to a resolution of 10 square kilometers.”

The study divides the 314 birds into two categories:  188 “climate-threatened” and 126 “climate-endangered”.   The climate-threatened birds” face losing more than half of their current range by 2080, although they have the potential to shift into new areas.”  The “climate-endangered” species, like the bald eagle, "are projected to lose more than 50 percent of their current range by 2050, with no net gain from range expansion.”

Although only nine birds species have gone extinct in continental North America in modern times, the losses were spectacular and caught the general public by surprise.  This is especially true of the passenger pigeon, which flew in such awesome numbers that no one believed they could become extinct.  But it happened.  On September 1, 1914, the last passenger pigeon, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo, where it was kept as part of an unsuccessful attempt to save the species through a breeding program.

So, it’s appropriate for Ohioans to take the lead in in accepting  Audubon’s challenge to act now to prevent these predictions from being fulfilled.  After all, because Martha died relatively close to Columbus, the National Audubon Society chose the Audubon headquarters in Columbus to be the home of the sculptures of the passenger pigeon and four other extinct birds:  Labrador Duck, the Great Auk, the Heath Hen, and the Carolina Parakeet.  The other North American birds that went extinct since records were kept are:  Bachman’s Warbler, Dusky Seaside Sparrow, Eskimo Curlew, and Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.

Even Chad Robbins , the father of modern ornithology who organized the North American Breeding Survey, told me he never believed that the Kirtland warbler would be so close to extinction in his lifetime.

 I have never seen such an alarming issue of Audubon magazine—All 314 names of the threatened species runs along the top of 57 pages of the 102-page issue.

The Audubon study is undergoing peer review for journal publication.

Saving the Monarch Butterfly

You can start saving monarch butterflies by planting milkweed in your yard.  And, you can buy seedlings of common butterfly and butterfly weed (a compact milkweed) for $1 each at the Earth Day festival at Kenyon College on Sunday, April 6, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.   The seedlings will be sold at the Brown Family Environmental Center's booth at the festival, which will also have live monarch butterflies on display.

Populations of monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico have crashed this winter, reaching nearly rock bottom, after a long-term decline starting with the winter of 1997-1998.  The butterflies were not only a week late in arriving in Mexico last November, but their numbers were the lowest yet, 94 percent less than the record high in the winter of 1996-1997.

Heather Doherty, program manager of the Brown Center, describes the problem--and some solutions--in the Center's April newsletter, which is online at their website .
The easiest place to start, she says, are out lawns, where we can carve out some space for milkweed.

The Frontier of Ecology is in Our Yards, Not the Arctic

That reminds me of the theme of the annual conference of the Baltimore-Washington Partners for Forest Stewardship I attended in 2011:  The frontier of ecology is in your backyard.   conference theme at a conference I went to several years ago in Maryland:  The frontier of ecology is in our yards.  The point is that solutions to problems such as global warming and declines in species like the monarch butterfly lie in the backyards of cities and suburbs.  This is because it is in such developed areas that the causes arise, not in faraway places like the Arctic where the results show up most dramatically.