Few issues of our
day are as huge, in scope or in implication, as climate change. The task of
wrestling this topic down into something that the human mind can manage,
without losing sight of the big picture because it’s snowing in Buffalo, is likely to be
the task of a lifetime for many science communicators. All sorts of tools are
needed in this work, from highly technical reports to novels and popular
nonfiction, and from localized accounts to vast overviews.
Winged Sentinels - Birds and Climate Change falls squarely in the middle of this
range: while it is unlikely to be picked up for beach reading, it is written at
a level suitable for an undergraduate student or informed layperson. And while
its focus is narrow in the sense that it is a book about birds, it is
nevertheless wide-ranging in its consideration of the implications of changes
to weather patterns, land use, and the phenology of the food webs birds depend
upon.
The book opens
with an engaging description of a colony of Southern Rockhopper Penguins,
whose plummeting numbers may be attributable to warming ocean temperatures.
From there, we learn of the effects of season creep on Great Tits and
winter moth caterpillars in the Netherlands,
the increasing gap between male and female migration dates in
Africa-wintering Barn Swallows and the lengthening migration of Barred
Warblers as their breeding grounds shift north. The authors discuss the
possible fate of dabbling ducks in the prairie potholes of North
America as suitable moisture level shift eastward into more
heavily human-populated regions, and the threats to Ivory Gulls as
the Arctic sea ice thins and ocean surface temperatures rise. They ponder the
population dynamics of Eurasian Golden Plovers and the impact of
increasing cyclone activity on Mourning Warblers, among many other
ornithological topics. In short, they turn their attention to every facet of
bird existence and examine the current research minutely for evidence that
avian life is being impacted by rising global temperatures and the knock-on
consequences thereof.
Throughout, the
authors are thorough and frank about the ongoing, sometimes speculative nature
of the research involved in discovering these links – which is both good
science and, hopefully, an encouragement for students and amateur naturalists
to get involved in answering these questions. In the concluding chapter, they
explicitly call for more involvement by volunteer ornithology networks,
especially in the tropics where fewer amateurs in the field have access to
online tools and organized support. And speaking of online tools, in
recognition of the expanding nature of their field, the authors have also
created a Winged Sentinels blog that
follows the issue of birds and climate change (as well as promoting the book.)
If I have any
complaints, they lie not in the information but in the way the information is
presented. On the whole, the book is concise and easy to understand, and it is
generously illustrated with color photographs and diagrams – no issues there.
However, the reasoning behind the organizational scheme of the chapters is somewhat
obscure to me – though each builds on the information previously presented,
there is a degree of repetition and overlap that sometimes threw me off.
Perhaps this is just the nature of the beast when dealing with nature and
beasts – they do not, after all, fit into neat mental boxes – but I can’t help
but wonder what might have been had the authors chosen to order their
information not by the high-level concepts they chose, but by bird life-cycle
stages or by regions. In
addition, and in part because of the authors’ very right and necessary
scrupulousness, the more poetically descriptive passages sometimes fall short
for me style-wise. But this is unlikely to impact the real value of the book
for its target audience of field naturalists and conservationists.
On the whole, if
you consider yourself one of the above, you should consider adding this book to
your shelf.