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 lb all of that heft helps with its honk this species of swan was nearly extinct by the 1800s but they’ve come back 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 deel producer Rachel leevy mclin to see spring migration up close I’m manica rammen Wilms and this is the deible from the globe and male um all right great where are we going manica we are going to lemington Ontario which is very close to point peely which is where one of the biggest bird migrations happen it’s like this tiny little point that juts out um and I think it’s one of the southernmost or if not the southernmost point in Canada o I think it’s the southernmost looking at the map okay 3 hours 26 minutes Point peely sticks out in Lake are 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 peely National Park use the right lane to take exit 48 onto Highway 77 toward lington 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 right you a birder it’s like well we’re going to talk to the birders that’s very that’s very fun yes so there’s going to be lots of people doing like 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 birer like I’m an enthusiastic but a very poor bder 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 uh Jeremy vet I’m a local burer and tour guide in The Point pey area we’re on a quest to try to see a 100 species of birds in the point peely 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 it to truly understand how important this tiny slice of Canada is and what’s at risk if climate patterns change bird there that I was wondering there’s also a bird very similar with like a red stripe on it uh yes that one oh it does have red on red and yellow Redwing BL Red Wing okay Marcus has identified it our first bird of the day so uh yeah that’s uh be about a million of those and we’re just standing here in the parking lot L right next to the parking lot yeah [Laughter] part of the reason why Point peely is teaming 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 en environment that’s Dr scottt 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 Aven research something internal lets them know that spring is coming uh and then they also respond to cues like the days getting longer uh 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 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 blackpole warbler a song bird that’s about 14 cm long that’s shorter than your phone and it weighs about 12 G roughly four pingpong balls this tiny little black and white bird flies for almost 3 days non-stop covering thousands of kilometers including long stretches over 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 uh 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 peely one of the birds that was returning to its summer home was the ponary warbler it was the fifth bird we spotted on our quest to see 100 so 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 ponary warbler this wouldn’t be able to survive in the winter here uh 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 ponary 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 peely is such an important piece of land for migration because it is 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 uh a a rare habitat even for southern Ontario it certainly feels uh 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 peely uh yeah that uh common grale over there so that’s it’s like one of your typical like black birds that would be at your bird feeders that was my first bird through the binoculars cool it’s got oh yeah it’s got like kind of a blue a blue head actually I can see a yeah they are really nice looking you get the light on them and all kinds of iridescent colors iridescent so we’re looking relatively High into the treetop here um and we’re looking for uh so female Scarlet tanagers are green colored they’re like yellow green and blend in really really well whereas the males are like scar red with black wings on them um they say you know we have redwinged black birds and these are the black wied red birds that’s really cute oh up there oh yeah what is this these are Cedar Wax wings and so these are the birds I was saying were flying over earlier 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 parks Wetlands where we saw a collection of Warblers including the yellow warbler the chestnut sided warbler the black throated Blue Warbler and the warbling Viro which is actually not a warbler we also spied some Shorebirds and water fowl including the American Golden PL and a bird with long toes called aora yeah and I I basically just oh do you hear that one so that was a SORA uh they basically are a little chicken shaped kind of thing they walk around in uh grassy Wetland like this so that Bird’s actually extremely close we can probably get a really brief look at it oh yeah 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 uh to to me it’s a bit like having a six sense um being a burer because everybody else is walking along and they’re hearing tweet tweet tweet but you’re hearing oh that’s uh Baltimore orial that’s a Yellow Warbler and so you’re just more aware of your surroundings uh your natural surroundings and and it’s a cool uh kind of insight into the natural world that most people just don’t have because they’re they’re not tuned in you kind of tuned in to Nature I guess hey Marcus what’s our tally now let’s check it out 50 50 halfway there there wow that’s awesome we’ll be right back the mark of an impressive burder 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 pneumonic 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 themy it’s like EOL 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 uh that just arrived recently um that bird is also species at risk in uh Ontario and Canada [Music] 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 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 breathe 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 uh 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 peely 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 um they’ll all find Woodland to land and that’s when we experience what uh 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 Aven research I’m Chris goo I’m a professor of biology here at Western University and I’m also the 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 Aven 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 um 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 okay so researchers can change atmospheric conditions in the tunnel things like temperature humidity even 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 song bird called the blackpole warbler fly 28 hours in here Non-Stop and this uh past year we had a 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 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 um 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 [Music] flights the day we were in point peely 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 peely we were only at 73 Birds it didn’t feel like we were going to hit our goal it’s ambitious very ambitious 73 Birds species still a lot of species that is a lot lot 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 but 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 I mean it’s cool to have a list I like making a list but thing about bird watching is even if it’s a terrible day for Birds you’ve still had a nice walk it’s true in nature and so it’s never like oh that was a terrible day and it hasn’t been a terrible day for Birds you’ve seen lot no it’s been excellent so no complaint and other animals too yep so what you’re saying is it’s totally fine if we don’t make it to 100 bird totally fine totally fine I didn’t have my honestly I didn’t it’s not a big deal that we not 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 defeat early sounds like sounds like justifying our complete failure I know but no I I’m sincerely not disappointed whatsoever in a last ditch effort we left the formal confines of the park and visited another protected spot Hilman 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 got to count them on our list what were the swans called again Jeremy these are trumpeter swans trumpeter swans we had been burning for almost 10 hours but we were finding new species at this Marsh I know it’s not about the numbers but we’re up to 88 species and what time is it 5:05 in the afternoon 3 hours of daylight left we spotted a new species of warbler the golden winged warbler doesn’t have that like sweet like whistly voice like all the other warblers this one just like go yeah and even a new shorebird the kill deer it looks a lot like the semi- palmated Sandpiper we or Plover we were looking at before but the kill deer has two rings it’s a lot larger um stands more upright like that we spied a mediumsized 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 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 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 in 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 we got it I got it so Marcus is going to find the H hundredth bird for what mefe pressure too much pressure I’m a terrible burer I told you I see a see but like 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 there can you can you point out the swan where’s the swan behind Jeremy all the way over there there like the kind of swans you see in Parks boom nice job 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 [Music] sound 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 birds. orgu a few of the birds sounds you heard today were courtesy of Cornell lab of ornithology mcau library and a thank you to Jeremy Benet for helping us find 100 species of birds his tour company is called peely birding I’m Manar ramman welms Kelsey Arnett is our intern this episode was written and produced by meline white our other producers are Cheryl Sutherland and Rachel Levy McLaughlin David Crosby edits the show Adrien Chong is our senior producer and and Matt frer is our managing editor thanks so much for listening and I’ll talk to you soon
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.
Subscribe to The Globe and Mail’s Morning Update to get stories directly in your inbox:
