In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• How birds “keep up” by shifting their ranges to cooler places, and the clearest real-world examples of birds already moving north

• Why the story is more complicated than “north and uphill,” including microclimates, precipitation shifts, and the messy reality of predicting habitat changes

• The full bird toolkit for coping with climate change: movement, timing (phenology), and even shrinking body size over generations, plus what we can do right now that actually helps birds

• 00:41 - Seasons and Nature's Cycles

• 02:31 - Birds and Climate Change: A New Era of Survival

• 12:16 - Birds and Climate Change: Understanding Responses and Adaptations

• 20:00 - The Impact of Climate Change on Bird Migration Timing

• 27:27 - Birds and Climate Change: Adaptation Strategies

Timestamp Disclosure
These timestamps were generated using AI and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided for accessibility and reference purposes only and may not perfectly reflect the original audio.

Dr. Morgan Tingley (Excerpt)
Every time the birds in my backyard eat all my fruit and I'm super frustrated and I'm like, darn you birds, stop eating my fruit. I have to pause and say, well, they need the fruit maybe more than I do.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah, they can't go over to the local Whole Foods or whatever you guys have in your neighborhood. As a kid back in rural Canada, seasons didn't feel like a debate.

Winter showed up, stayed too long, and then spring arrived in that dramatic last minute way where everything melts at once and you suddenly remember what the color green looks like. The calendar and the outdoors were mostly in agreement.

You could plan your life around when things usually happen and for the most part, nature would show up on time. But now, living in Denver, the timing is weird. You get a 70 degree day in February that feels like it should come with an apology.

Then a late snow that makes you question whether snow and winter still go together. Every summer we see record temperatures, records that are becoming the norm. And the birds are out here trying to run their entire annual schedule.

Migration, breeding, feeding, surviving, based on cues that are shifting under their feet. They're tiny, terrifyingly efficient feet. Globally, things are changing very fast.

This hits close to home for me because a lot of my own research has focused on chickadees. These tiny winter proof, big brained birds that somehow survive conditions that I certainly could not.

We've studied how chickadees respond to harsh winters, changing conditions and what it takes to make it through. But even with all that work, there's this bigger, broader question that my chickadee brain doesn't fully understand.

What happens when the entire map changes? When the right place to live moves and the right time to do everything shifts.

And you're a bird whose whole life is built around being in the right place at the right time. At least you can fly, I suppose. And then you start noticing the clues in your own neighborhood or the neighborhood you grew up in.

Birds that used to feel like they belonged somewhere else.

Like where I'm from, I'm seeing new faces show up that make me do a double take because my brain still has a little internal we don't have those here alarm. The world is warming, habitats are shifting and birds are responding in real time. Not as a future prediction, but as an ongoing update.

Which brings us to the topic of today's episode. Okay, but can birds keep up with climate change? And to help us answer that question, we're talking with Dr. Morgan Tingley.

Morgan is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA and studies how birds respond to climate change at large scales, where they live, how those ranges move and what helps them adapt and what quietly prevents them, even when the new habitat looks perfect on paper.

In other words, he's one of the people you really want in the group chat, when you're trying to understand whether birds can actually keep up with a planet that's changing faster than it has for many millions of years. Because the phrase keeping up gets tossed around a lot. And it sounds simple until you think about what it really means. Is it distance?

Like, can you physically move north or uphill fast enough? Is it timing? Can you still show up when spring food peaks? Is it having somewhere to go at all? Because you can move all you want.

But if the next stop is a parking lot and a housing development, congratulations. You've arrived at a problem, a big one. And even when a bird can move, there's the calendar problem, the phenology problem.

Spring arrives early, but the insects peak at a different time. Flowers bloom on one schedule, caterpillars hit their boom on another schedule.

And suddenly the thing you've timed perfectly for thousands of years becomes a coin flip. And if you're raising chicks, that's not acute inconvenience, that's survival.

So today we're going to talk about what keeping up really means, how scientists measure it, and what the cleanest examples are that birds are already shifting their ranges right now. We'll talk about whether birds always move north or uphill, or whether the story gets more complicated and sometimes, frankly, more unsettling.

We'll talk about why some birds still don't show up in places that seem newly suitable and what's actually blocking them. We'll talk about timing mismatches and what happens when the whole seasonal playlist changes but your body is still listening to the old track.

And then we'll end where I think we all want to end, with action. And hope. Not vague hope, not thoughts and prayers, but for birds.

Real things that actually help birds keep up and a realistic reason to believe the next 10 to 20 years can still be shaped by what we choose to protect, restore and connect. After the break, Dr. Morgan Tingley helps us answer the question behind the episode title. Okay, but can birds keep up with climate change?

And if not, what does it take to give them a fighting chance? Stay tuned. Well, welcome back, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Morgan, really appreciate you being here.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Thanks for having me.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah, so I thought we could start off just thinking about this often used phrase, birds may not be able to keep up with climate change. What does keeping up mean beyond that? How would we measure whether they're keeping up?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Mostly we're talking about how birds are responding to temperature. Okay, when we say climate change, we do mean more than global warming.

But in reality, even scientists, like, most of the time when we're studying climate change, we're still studying a world that's getting warmer.

And so a lot of the research that I've done, and I know people do on birds keeping up with climate change is like, how do they adapt to generally warming temperatures? And so the easiest way we think about that, or the first way we think about that is birds moving to where it's colder.

That is to say the world is getting warmer. Maybe it's now a little too hot for where you are. You need to go someplace colder.

And so that enters us into the realm of thinking about distributional shifts or range shifts, essentially bird populations moving to different places on the planet, trying to stay in the same climate they have been used to for millions of years. And so they will go someplace else.

So often that means something like going higher up in mountains or going closer to the poles here in North America, moving farther north.

When we're thinking about whether or not birds can keep up, we're talking about can they actually move fast enough to keep up with the pace of a warming world?

Dr. Scott Taylor
In that context, then, for you and your research, like, what do you think is the simplest or clearest example of birds that are already doing that?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
I became aware of this relatively early on as a birdwatcher, before I was a scientist. But we know that there's been birds that have been moving north, particularly in eastern North America, for about 50 years or so.

Species like northern mockingbirds. I grew up in New England in like, sort of Connecticut and other northern states. And, you know, in the 1950s, 1960s, mockingbirds wouldn't be there.

Cardinals I don't think were there until maybe the 70s. Carolina Wrens colonized New England in my lifetime. Yeah. Red bellied woodpeckers also colonized New England in my lifetime.

And so there are other factors at play with some of those expansions. But as a whole, a lot of these things are species moving north because the world's getting warmer.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah. And they're able to maybe survive the warmer winters.

And the red bellied woodpecker one is a great example because where I grew up, which is I guess technically the Midwest, although I don't really understand how Ontario is. Anyways, Canada and the United States use different terms for that area, but I grew up in Ontario.

And yeah, like we never had red bellied woodpeckers coming to the feeders at all. And I went away to college, came back and saw them at the feeders and was like, what the heck? And my dad's like, oh yeah, they're just like here now.

Which is shocking as someone who watched birds their whole childhood and never saw them. Eh?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Yeah. So I learned to look at nature from my grandmother and she lived in Connecticut. She lived in Connecticut basically her entire life.

And she was like a bird watcher, but not in like the current serious hardcore type of birdwatcher. And so she had like a 1947 version of the Peterson Guide to Birds of the World, or sorry, birds of Eastern North America, which is what she used.

But in the back of it, right, she, in pencil, she had written all of the birds that she'd seen and the date in which she saw them. And one of the very last birds she ever added to this list was red bellied woodpecker that I think first showed up in her yard in like 1987.

Yeah, cool. Even, you know, showing how even though that she'd been birding in this area for decades, like it took her until then to see it.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah, those, those changes are stark and they're happening now like within our lifetimes. And we're not that old, but we see those changes, which is.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
We're getting older. Scott.

Dr. Scott Taylor
No, no, you, you be quiet. In the context of these shifts then, are birds always moving north or uphill?

Or are we seeing any kind of what we think are responses to climate change that aren't intuitive? In that sense, we're seeing a huge.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Variety of different responses. And so that's due to a handful of things. One is generally as you go farther towards the pole, or if you go higher up a mountain, it gets colder.

And so you expect in really average terms that species will move in those directions. In reality, actually, the world and the environment is very complex.

And so there are places where if you're on a mountain, it can be colder if you just move from a south facing slope to a north facing slope.

And actually if you sometimes move from an exposed ridge to a lower down ravine, you actually can get these cold air drafts that come down the mountaintop. And so temperature isn't perfectly decreasing as you go up.

And so you can start to see through micro topography and the way that climate varies across entire mountain systems that some species are actually shifting downwards. That's one reason.

The even bigger reason is we started this conversation by making a simplification which is with simplifying global climate change to just temperature. And of course, it's everything. And particularly it's not just temperature, it's also precipitation, how much wet and rain there is.

And that is also really important for birds, as well as lots of other species, particularly plants and things like that. And so precipitation, we often think of it as second because it's much harder to characterize in the context of climate change.

And because it's difficult, we just don't want to engage with it. We're like, oh, let's talk about temperature. Because it's easy, we know it's increasing.

Parts of the world are getting wetter, parts of the world are getting drier. Parts of the world. The actual absolute amount of rain is staying the same, but it's just coming at different times in different amounts.

Here in California, we have these hydrographic whiplash periods where that's the sciencey term right now, where it's like deluge for a year and then drought for two years.

And so all of that makes the current way that the world is changing with climate difficult, but it also makes the future prediction of how the world is going to change really difficult. We see a lot more variety and variation than just like these simple hypotheses about species shifting up or shifting to the north.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Like here on the Front Range. We don't see a long term change in precipitation yet.

At least our records go back into the 40s, early 50s, and over that time there's no directional change. It's not getting drier, even though, you know, that's like the anecdotal.

Oh, we're getting less snow, we are getting less snow, but we're getting more precipitation in the form of rain, different times of year. Speaking to that, that variation and that can have huge impacts on. Yeah, when does green up happen? When are insects available for birds?

And that variation, I think, can lead to this.

Why are birds not showing up where we think they could be to that point then in your current research right now, what are you really focusing on in terms of understanding climate change and bird distributional shifts or persistence in given areas?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
One of the things that I've been trying to do recently is move beyond just distributional shifts to also thinking about how all of the ways that birds can respond to climate.

I can think of a bird responding to a warming world by having actually a big metaphorical ecological evolutionary toolbox that it can use to cope with this changing world.

One of those tools is just a population shift or an individual movement shift changing where you live to change the exposure that you have, a second tool could be actually changing your body shape or your body size. Obviously individuals can't do that themselves, but populations can do over generations. And the third would be changing their seasonal exposure.

So the science word is phenology, which is the seasonal timing of expected events, which for a bird could be when it migrates, when it breeds, when it lays its eggs, when its eggs hatch, when it does its fall migration. All of those timings actually control birds have different sensitivities to climate at different times of its life.

When those events happen will determine how exposed it is to different types of climate. If you can just shift some of those timings, you can actually change how much climate affects you.

What I've been trying to do is trying to actually understand all of these different tools in the toolbox to kind of think about a more holistic overall picture of how birds respond to a warming world.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, I think the holistic approach is super important, but like you're pointing out, it hasn't really been taken.

Are there any examples from your research that you think in the context of like this more holistic framework are really interesting how birds might be adapting or are adapting to change?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
You know, we've done, we've published some work looking at how. Right. Birds body sizes are changing, which is a really cool idea.

And the idea behind this is that as the world gets warmer, we expect species to get smaller. There's some good biophysical reasons for this, that if you're a smaller body size, you're more able to sort of dissipate heat.

Whereas if you're a big rounder body size, you contain heat more. Which is why like when you go up to the Arctic, the species are kind of bigger and fatter.

And if you go down to the equator, species are smaller and leaner. And so as the world gets warmer, we'd expect actual populations to get smaller in body size, which is what we're finding.

Like we're finding that birds bodies are shrinking in size. That doesn't happen at the individual level. It happens over generations.

And so it's just really cool to see that happening alongside all of these other things.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah, for sure. That's such a major change.

And what kind of data sets are you using to draw those conclusions about long term reductions in body size and in what birds are you really seeing it the most?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Yeah, so the work that I've done is actually based off of banding data. Okay. People have looked at this with Multiple different data sorts. One, there's been a handful of studies that have used museum specimens.

The big study that we did was using about four decades of banding data, standardized banding data on breeding, like during of of the breeding season.

So you're capturing birds kind of where they're living in the summer, which should generally be where they're exposed to the hottest temperatures, right?

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
And so you just capture them in mist nets, you measure their body size.

So usually that's just weight, but we kind of control, we control for wing length and things like that to kind of get a standardized measurement and then release them. And you do this year after year and decade after decade. And so within those populations you can start to look to see how this is shifting.

And because of that data, and I think in general where people have seen this the most is with small songbirds. So things like warblers and sparrows and buntings and grosbeaks and tanagers and stuff like that.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah. Which all have relatively short generation times.

So across a 40 year period, if you're going to expect to see change in a bird population at that level, like body size changes, you might not expect to see it in albatross, which have very, very long generation times and live a long time, versus these little warblers and sparrows, which have average lifespans of two years. Some live longer, obviously, but they don't live very long.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Yeah, those, those poor albatross are going to have to find some other way to.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Right. Yeah.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Respond to temperature.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah. Which is, it's pretty sobering to think about that.

A lot of, a lot of these, you know, a lot of birds aren't that long lived and maybe they can rapidly evolve.

But there are so many species that, that have these long generation times and the speed of change is, is maybe too fast for adaptation to, to give them a leg up on, on what's going on. I mean, phenology can mean a lot of things.

Have you guys been measuring that in the populations you've been looking at like this match between food availability and when the chicks are there?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
The general idea behind bird phenology and a lot of bird phenology research is that there is this peak in food abundance that is kind of actually driven almost purely by caterpillar abundance.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
And caterpillar density. And that that peak abundance of food is going to happen sometime in early June. Right. It's like a month after leaf out. So caterpillars eat leaves.

Leaves emerge in the springtime in deciduous areas. And as Those leaves grow when they're first starting. They don't have chemical defenses, so they're nutritious and digestible.

But as the leaf develops, the tree which tries to prevent its leaves from being eaten, puts all these more chemical defenses into the leaf. And so the leaf becomes less palatable. Plenty of things can still eat it. But there's this bonanza.

It's like this food bonanza early in the spring which leads to this huge increase of caterpillars.

And that, that should be this food resource peak that birds should be trying to optimize to have their hungry baby mouths accessible during that time of peak availability so that the adults a can raise as many young as possible and also work as little as possible to get that food that the kids require.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah, the caterpillar piece is interesting. I mean, it would have been a very different end for the very hungry caterpillar if it had been around during peak food availability.

But like, caterpillars are nutritionally very, very dense. And yeah, it's interesting how many songbirds rely on a lot of caterpillars, lepidopterans, moths and butterflies to feed their chicks.

And I think, yeah, that, that is shifting in so many places, like leaf out.

Like, I, you know, I think in Denver, some trees are already like the leaves are sort of coming out because you've had such a warm winter, which means the availability of food for insects next spring is really already altered, which will affect our local birds.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
And that's exactly what the concern is, right? Because like, leaf out is temperature driven. Like trees respond to temperature and light levels. But, you know, temperature can really cause leaf out.

Early caterpillars are going to also be very, very strongly temperature driven. It's almost like a pure mathematical model about how many days above freezing you can get in order for caterpillars to emerge.

And so caterpillars are expected to be pretty well tied to the trees. But Scott, most of our small insectivorous birds are migratory, right? Like, they don't spend the winter in Colorado.

They do spend the winter in California, but a lot of them don't spend the winter in Colorado and they're off having fun in Mexico or Panama or Brazil or something like that. And so they don't know, they don't get the weather down in Brazil of what's going on in Colorado.

And so if it's a really early spring in Colorado, they're likely to return at the normal time and be like, oh, darn, like I missed it. And there's a lot of Variation like we look for this stuff, and the reality is that we do find this, right?

So, like when in years where it's a really early spring, we find that the birds both, when they arrive in North America, they actually do their migration faster.

Particularly we see this on the east coast, that if it's an early spring kind of everywhere on the east coast, the birds will hit Louisiana, they'll hit the Gulf coast, have them cross the Gulf of Mexico at the kind of normal time, they'll hit the Gulf coast heading north, and they will actually travel faster in years of early spring than in years of normal spring. Because presumably they're sensing that they're behind the expected seasonal phenology.

And so they will get to their breeding sites and they still might end up being late and kind of behind the peak. And that is a problem.

We do find that actually when they become really mismatched from the local seasonal phenology, that they end up having things like producing fewer yang. And so there is a cost, and it's a cost that we expect unfortunately, to increase in the future that birds will become more mistimed.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah. And I think it's important to point out that the world has always been variable.

The reality is birds should have a sense for what you're describing, but that maybe the speed at which they have to go now because of how advanced it is or the regularity with which things are mistimed is increasing in frequency. And so they do have some ability to respond to that, but maybe not fast enough, like you're pointing out, or not.

You know, every year you have to have this accelerated migration. And those fitness costs are real. You know, if you're only raising half the chicks you raise a year.

If you think about how many birds die every year because of predators or all the other stressors that we are also adding to the planet, then you can't have a lot of years with less offspring before you see pretty significant overall declines in birds, which. Which we are seeing.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
So there's actually strong reasons why birds should not be trying to actually hit the peak of food availability that they should actually be trying to hit a little beyond it.

And part of it is like the idea that you can't actually hit the bullseye exactly with the timing, but that if you in that if you unfortunately arrive too early, it's actually much worse than if you arrive too late. See, if you arrive too early, a, it's like potentially still really cold and you're just going to die of hypothermia.

But also like, your eggs hatch and there's just no food available. Right. Like, in a normal year. Okay. Actually, Denver is so strange, but it's so weird.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Talk about it. I'm not used to living here, and I've been here for a while.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
I was going to say in a normal year, you know, like, let's say the bird.

Like, the babies hatch on June 1st, but if, like, if they arrived on June 1st, know, for some reason the babies hatched, like, May 15th, there just might be nothing available. Whereas on June 15th, okay, you're two weeks behind the peak, but there's still plenty. Like, everything is green, everything is sunny.

Everyone's happy because the winter's over and there's plenty of food left to eat. And so, you know, the costs of being late are much less than the costs of being early.

There's always those, like, gray, bitterly cold days in, like, March.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Where you're just hoping for some sign because you still know in reality that, like, everything is, like, six weeks to eight weeks away. Yeah. But, like, the Cardinals have suddenly started singing. Yeah.

Dr. Scott Taylor
You know how I used to, like, seek that out early? So I don't. I don't watch golf. I don't. No offense. Golf is whatever, fine. People love it. I don't.

But I would watch the Masters because the Masters was broadcast in. When does it happen? March or even April. It's happened at a time where I was living. The Cardinals hadn't even really started singing yet.

But if you watch, it takes place.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
In Augusta, Georgia, right?

Dr. Scott Taylor
It does, right? Yeah. So it was already, like, full on spring in Georgia, and you could hear all the eastern songbirds singing.

And I was just, like, sitting, watching golf, mildly caring about who won, but mostly like, yes, spring is somewhere, which feels pretty sad, but I did it every year.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
I thought, wait, but are the birds in the background of the Masters true?

Dr. Scott Taylor
I think so, yeah. I think Augusta is actually, like, quite habitat rich. I mean, unless.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Isn't there a famous example of them playing a song of a Bachmann's warbler during the Masters?

Dr. Scott Taylor
Really?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
I fact check this, but where there's an example like that, there's, like, they played. Maybe it wasn't the Masters.

I swear that during a broadcast of the Masters, they played a recording of a Bachmann's warbler, which is an extinct species, just to mess with birdwatchers.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Oh, really?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Ooh.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Well, it gave me hope in the spring, so maybe I don't care. Oh, s***. I was duped.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
News flash, Masters golf subject to sound enhancement.

Dr. Scott Taylor
I had no Idea. I just thought it was like how Augusta sounded.

From your perspective and your focus on studying climate change in birds, it can be pretty like a downer a lot of the time.

And I think people listening might be wondering, you know, what things should we be hopeful for in the context of, like, what birds can do and how they can respond? What might be realistic to hope for, you know, in the shorter term or longer term for bird populations in general?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Everywhere that we've imagined, every tool that we've imagined that birds could use to respond to climate change, we find evidence that they use it. So it's not that they just have one hammer in that toolkit, but they got a whole variety of different things, and they're using them all now.

They're using them to different efficiencies, and it's unclear whether or not, unfortunately, the toolkit is going to be enough for every species in every place. But there's a lot of different ways that they can adapt. And of course, you know, birds have existed on this planet for millions of years.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah. Tens of millions of years.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Tens of millions of years. And they've adapted now, you know, the pace right now is real fast.

And so there's, you know, undoubtedly we might lose species, and certainly we're going to lose populations in the future, but we're going to still have birds.

Because in addition to the fact that birds have a lot of different ways of coping and that a lot of us want to help them and we will be helping them and are helping them, there's also some species that do really well and that are really flexible, and those birds will be just fine.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah, yeah. It's important to remember that I think that there's going to be variation in what happens, but life is resilient.

And I always think about, like, in the context of recommendations, like, you know, what can a conservation decision maker do? It's like, protect habitat, you know, wherever you can protect it, whether it's farther north or farther downslope.

Like, without those areas, natural areas for certain species to go, they don't have hope. But habitat protection gives them the potential to have the time to adapt or whatever. And, yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
The more that we can actually protect areas and keep them viable and healthy for birds, birds will have an extra level of adaptation. Every time the birds in my backyard eat all my fruit, and I'm super frustrated, and I'm like, darn you, birds, stop eating my fruit.

I have to pause and say, well, they need the fruit maybe more than I do.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah, they can't Go over to the local Whole Foods or whatever you guys have in your neighborhood. So what eats your citrus Woodpeckers?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Well, actually, citrus are weird. Like they're fruiting at the same time that they blossom kind of. Yeah.

And so we're about a few weeks away from, like, citrus blooming season, which is a lovely time you should visit. The air smells amazing in Southern California, but, yeah, the orange crowned warblers and things will eat the blossoms.

But really, this is a very Southern California thing. But it's our persimmons. Oh, we have the figs, too.

The figs I can't actually ever harvest because the house finches in particular will just destroy them. But the persimmons are because they have a hard exterior, but a noddles woodpecker will come first.

And the Nolls woodpecker is like the ripeness tester. And just drilling into each one, being like, oh, is this one right? Is this one right? Is this one right?

And if it finds the right one, then it's like, okay, I'm gonna eat the whole persimmon.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Oh, wow.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
But then it has now left holes in every other persimmon.

And so then, like, the house finches and the yellow rump warblers are like, oh, now I have an opportunity for attack because the woodpeckers drilled through the hard exterior. And so then they will go in and just hollow the thing out.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Oh, man.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
And then there's also the raccoons and the possums. I even had a coyote that has learned to climb my tree and eat the persimmons.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Really?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
Yeah. It's a whole wildlife bonanza back here.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah.

Okay, we've reached the part of the show that we call that's BS or that's bird stuff, where we give our guests an opportunity to debunk a myth that ruffles their feathers. So, Morgan, what do you want to call BS on?

Dr. Morgan Tingley
I want to call BS on the idea that if you feed birds in the fall, that it can prevent them from migrating.

This is a common misconception, particularly with hummingbirds, where people are worried that if they keep their hummingbird feeders out, and even particularly in the east, that ruby throated hummingbirds won't migrate and that they will sort of hang around because they're dependent on this feeder, and then they'll die off. And that is not true.

Birds are undergoing lots of different cues that tell them when to migrate, and a lot of that is, like, light level and temperature, and some of it is food availability too. But when birds need to migrate. They're gone.

Dr. Scott Taylor
They're gonna go. Yeah.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
And, and so it's like actually pretty good advice to keep your hummingbird feeders up in the east coast, you know, for several weeks after you've seen the last hummingbird.

Because you never know if another hummingbird from farther north is coming through a little late and just needs a snack, a fuel up on their way south.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Absolutely, yeah. And for the hummingbird feeders, no red dye.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
You don't have to one part sugar to four parts water. Don't do one part sugar to one part water. They don't need like simple syrup slurry.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Yeah, I mean, they do like sugarier water, but yeah, one to four. So one part sugar.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
I mean, they will love is good. I shouldn't say this, but they will love a really sugary water.

But the problem is that that will attract a lot of ants, will attract bees, and it goes, it spoils really quickly, really fast. And so that the more sugary water is like, it just will end up probably growing bacteria and, and hurting your hummingbirds.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Totally. Thank you so much for being here, Morgan. It's been really awesome to hear about your research and get to chat about birds and climate change.

Dr. Morgan Tingley
It's been great to be here. Thanks, Scott.

Dr. Scott Taylor
Birds are dinosaurs, and around here we like our snacks. So we end each episode with a dinosaur nugget. Today's dinosaur nugget is that birds have many ways of adjusting and adapting to climate change.

But the speed with which any specific bird species will adapt depends on generation time. We're already seeing changes like the evolution of smaller body size in shorter lived species. That's a wrap on this week's episode.

Okay, but can birds keep up with climate change? If you like this episode, leave a comment like and subscribe. Thanks for listening or watching. We love our apple family, which is dominating.

But did you know you can watch our episodes on Spotify or YouTube. We'll catch you next time. Byeee. Okay, But... Birds is hosted by Scott Taylor with production and creative by Zach Karl.

Transcript Disclosure
This transcript was generated using AI-assisted transcription and may contain errors or omissions. Please refer to the audio or video episode for the most accurate representation.

All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Bird media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:

• Northern Cardinal audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML249823

• Carolina Wren audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML191224

• Red-bellied Woodpecker audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML306064

• Orange-crowned Warbler audio contributed by Bob McGuire, ML206459

• Orange-crowned Warbler video contributed by Timothy Barksdale, ML402530

• House Finch audio contributed by William R. Fish, ML12932