(And by we, I mean Jeffrey.) He did the climbing, and re-installation, I did the ladder holding and daydreaming. Project 1: The motion sensing LED flood light over our garage door died, so we had to replace it with the new one we ordered. (And all the more Curses that I missed so much of it sleeping.) That didn’t happen today, so fun stuff got set aside and errands and chores filled the afternoon.Īfter running out to drop an item off to my Mother, pick up a couple items at the Liquor store, and pick up my prescription at the pharmacy, we headed home to house projects, all of which were outdoors so we were glad to have a beautiful, unseasonably warm fall day. I like to get my chores and errands done early – before noon – so I can relax and enjoy the rest of the day doing fun stuff. Sleeping late on a weekend always throws my day off. However, to my horror, I had gone back to sleep for 4 and a half hours.Sigh. I assumed I had just nodded off for a moment, and he had gotten up to join us with the start of the day.
Somewhere between getting him re-settled and me scrolling through the social media crap on my phone, I fell asleep again and stayed that way until I heard Jeffrey on the sofa next to me.
#Late bird gets the full
In the interest of full disclosure, I did not sleep much last night (the worries of the mind are a wicked thing), then I got up at 6:30am with Harvey, who decided he was tired of sleeping in the comfy bed between us and needed to be sleeping between my legs on the comfy lounge in the living room instead. “If the climate warms, the ideal time for breeding might be much earlier.” If they can’t identify those changes, Gow said, it could have ramifications throughout their migration cycle.I wasted my entire Saturday morning sleeping and did not get up until 11:00am. “The birds will start breeding the second week of May,” she said. Weather changes could impact departure times and the abundance of prey along the way, she said. A delay in reaching their breeding times could give them less time to breed and put them at risk of nest predators.īut the wintering grounds give them a chance to reset for the next cycle, they found.Īlthough their research did not directly study climate change, Gow said, their findings suggest that it could impact the birds. “When we see a bird in the summer sitting on a fencepost, raising their young, the timing of activities can influence when they arrive at winter stopover sites and tropical wintering grounds.”Ī delay at their breeding grounds - a storm, a change in habitat - could lead to a late arrival at their wintering grounds, creating a danger that they won’t find adequate food when they arrive. “The timing of when a bird breeds has cascading events that happen thousands of kilometers away from the breeding grounds,” Gow said. Outfitting over 130 birds with light-level geolocators weighing less than a gram, they were able to track how long the birds spent at the breeding grounds to raise their young, when they departed for points south, where they stopped to refuel and when they arrived at their wintering grounds.Įach step along the journey can have ramifications for the rest of the migration cycle, they found.
Researchers say this study was the first to track the timing of 12 distinct populations across the continent. Previous studies followed a single population of the bird, which breeds throughout Canada and the northern United States and migrates to southern states, Mexico and the Caribbean. “If we want to understand the decline of the birds, we need to understand how they behave and where they go at different scales,” said Gow, lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
#Late bird gets the how to
The findings shed light on how to conserve the birds, whose numbers are dwindling.
They found that a delay at one point in the migration can have ripple effects throughout the cycle, but at their wintering grounds, the birds have a chance to reset the clock. But improvements in technology allowed biologists to fit tiny tree swallows ( Tachycineta bicolor)with even tinier GPS “backpacks,” allowing them to paint a vivid picture of the birds’ 3,500-kilometer migration across North America. A few years ago, University of Guelph researcher Elizabeth Gow’s work wouldn’t have been possible.
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