The swallows are back--way early

[pscot]

This morning the sky is full of green and violet swallows. I've been tracking the return of these handsome little birds for years. They generally show up the last week in April, but there has been a schedule change.

[suston96]

1. Early migrations of the animal world may be indicators of climate changes......global warming?

[Shoelace]

2. yes, early bird migrations are on the list of things to watch with global climate change

from a transcript of a video about the effects of climate change and bird migration comes this:

One way to monitor changes in climate is to simply go bird watching. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook. I recently spoke with Scott Weidensaul, author of "Living on the Wind," a book about birds. And I asked him if there were any noticeable effects on bird behavior as a result of climate change:

SW: "Well, it's obviously going to have an effect and we're starting to see some indications. For example, studies both in the upper Great Lakes region and in parts of Europe are showing that birds are arriving 10 or 12 days earlier in the Spring and leaving 10 or 12 days later in the fall than they did as recently as the 1960's. So, it's changing the timing of migration.

The difficulty of course is that migration is a very delicately balanced system. These birds are moving across thousands of miles and are dependant frequently on ephemeral food resources along the way, like shorebirds that land in the Delaware Bay in the Spring, just when the horseshoe crabs are coming out of the deep water and laying their eggs on the beaches. If there's a disconnect there, if the birds arrive early or later, there's no food for them. And this migration system that carries them 18,000 miles a year may fall apart.

We don't really know what the effects of global climate change are going to be on birds, but it's clear that with many of them it's going to be a fairly significant negative effect."


More info at the link:
http://www.weathernotebook.org/transcripts/1999/10/15.html